Marquis de Sade — "Let there be no doubt of it: religions are the cradles of despotism."
Let there be no doubt of it: religions are the cradles of despotism.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"And if I were a naughty little boy, the idea is to spank me into good behavior?"
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness."
"The more evil I do, the more good I feel."
"The greatest pleasure of life is love; the greatest luxury is being able to love."
"Nothing that makes one hard is wicked and the only crime in the world is to refuse oneself that pleasure."
About Marquis de Sade (1740-1814)
French aristocrat-libertine whose name became 'sadism' and whose novels test the limits of Enlightenment liberalism's 'do as you will' axiom. Closely associated with Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (Les Liaisons dangereuses author). For an intellectual contrast, see Immanuel Kant, German Enlightenment philosopher of the categorical imperative — Sade and Kant published in the same decades; Kant's 'treat others as ends, never means' is the systematic ethical opposite of Sade's libertine instrumentalism — the two roads philosophy took out of Enlightenment freedom.
The standard scholarly entry points to Marquis de Sade's work: Maurice Blanchot (French literary critic) — Lautréamont and Sade (1949); Jacques Lacan (École freudienne de Paris) — Kant with Sade (1963 essay); Camille Paglia (University of the Arts Philadelphia) — Sexual Personae (1990) — extensive Sade chapters. These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Marquis de Sade.