Marquis de Sade — "The only real crime is to be boring."
The only real crime is to be boring.
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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?"
"Happiness lies only in that which excites, and the only thing that excites is crime."
"Nature has granted me a right to satisfy all my desires."
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it."
"One would have to lose one's wits to believe in a God, and to become a complete imbecile to adore Him."
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.