Marquis de Sade — "The greatest pleasure of all is to corrupt others."
The greatest pleasure of all is to corrupt others.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"To be good is to be weak."
"One must do violence to the object of one's desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater."
"Never yield to remorse, it is a cowardly feeling."
"There is nothing more delicious to see or do. I refer to both: for it is just as pleasant to spy upon someone as to want to be observed."
"There is no act more sublime than that of destruction."
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.