Marquis de Sade — "There is no crime that does not contain a certain amount of pleasure."
There is no crime that does not contain a certain amount of pleasure.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"My manner of thinking, so you say, is an abomination. And yet, I have never been able to think otherwise."
"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."
"My only religion is pleasure."
"To be truly free, one must be free from all laws, even those of nature."
"The reasoning man who scorns the prejudices of simpletons necessarily becomes the enemy of simpletons; he must expect as much, and laugh at the inevitable."
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.