Marquis de Sade — "The true way to live is to be without any laws."
The true way to live is to be without any laws.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"I cannot bring myself to fear a God who is either spiteful or weak. I defy him without fear and care not a fig for his thunderbolts."
"Either kill me or take me as I am, because I'll be damned if I ever change."
"The more one sins, the more one lives."
"All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few."
"It is utterly misguided to say that the mouth of a woman or young boy must be absolutely clean in order to give pleasure; putting all manias to one side, I shall grant you if you wish that a man who c…"
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.