Marquis de Sade — "My principles are simple: I do what I please."
My principles are simple: I do what I please.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"There is no God, nor any of those things that are called virtues."
"The greatest happiness is to be found in the contemplation of one's own wickedness."
"The greatest beauty is to be found in deformity."
"No need to touch at greater length on what pertains to the full business of population, from now on we shall address ourselves principally, nay, uniquely to those libertine lecheries whose spirit is i…"
"What is crime? What is virtue? All depends on the point of view."
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.