Marquis de Sade — "What is crime? What is virtue? All depends on the point of view."
What is crime? What is virtue? All depends on the point of view.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"The most beautiful thing in the world is a woman in tears."
"The greatest pleasure in life is to do what people say you cannot do."
"There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author."
"I have no other desire than to live and to write."
"The greatest pleasure is to imagine what is impossible."
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.