Marquis de Sade — "There is no good or evil, there is only pleasure and pain."
There is no good or evil, there is only pleasure and pain.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"After demonstrating that theism is unsuitable for a republican government, I find it crucial to prove that French morals are likewise inappropriate."
"How many times, by God's bloody prick, have I longed to be able to detonate planets, to destroy the sun itself, to pluck it from the universe and crash it into the earth, annihilating all Creation and…"
"My tastes are not general, I admit; but they are not criminal."
"The more perverse a pleasure, the more refined it is."
"Either kill me or take me as I am, because I'll be damned if I ever change."
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.