''Sex'' is as important as eating or drinking and we ought to allow the one appetite to be satisfied with as little restraint or false modesty as the other.
~ Marquis De Sade - [Sex]

In libertinage, nothing is frightful, because everything libertinage suggests is also a natural inspiration; the most extraordinary, the most bizarre acts, those which most arrantly seem to conflict with every law, every human institution... even those that are not frightful, and there is not one amongst them all that cannot be demonstrated within the boundaries of nature.
~ Marquis De Sade - [Sexuality]

Never may an act of possession be exercised upon a free being; the exclusive possession of a woman is no less unjust than the possession of slaves; all men are born free, all have equal rights: never should we lose sight of those principles; according to which never may there be granted to one sex the legitimate right to lay monopolizing hands upon the other, and never may one of the sexes, or classes, arbitrarily possess the other.
~ Marquis De Sade - [Submission]

So long as the laws remain such as they are today, employ some discretion: loud opinion forces us to do so; but in privacy and silence let us compensate ourselves for that cruel chastity we are obliged to display in public.
~ Marquis De Sade - [Tact and Tactfulness]

To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.
~ Marquis De Sade - [Theology]

I've already told you: the only way to a woman's heart is along the path of torment. I know none other as sure.
~ Marquis De Sade - [Torture]

Here am I: at one stroke incestuous, adulteress, sodomite, and all that in a girl who only lost her maidenhead today! What progress, my friends... with what rapidity I advance along the thorny road of vice!
~ Marquis De Sade - [Vice]

She had already allowed her delectable lover to pluck that flower which, so different from the rose to which it is nevertheless sometimes compared, has not the same faculty of being reborn each spring.
~ Marquis De Sade - [Virginity]

Ah, EugTnie, have done with virtues! Among the sacrifices that can be made to those counterfeit divinities, is there one worth an instant of the pleasures one tastes in outraging them?
~ Marquis De Sade - [Virtue]

Lycurgus, Numa, Moses, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, all these great rogues, all these great thought-tyrants, knew how to associate the divinities they fabricated with their own boundless ambition.
~ Marquis De Sade - [Vision]

They declaim against the passions without bothering to think that it is from their flame philosophy lights its torch.
~ Marquis De Sade - [Passion]

Miserable creatures, thrown for a moment on the surface of this little pile of mud, is it decreed that one half of the flock should be the persecutor of the other? Is it for you, mankind, to pronounce on what is good and what is evil?
~ Marquis De Sade - [Persecution]

The ultimate triumph of philosophy would be to cast light upon the mysterious ways in which Providence moves to achieve the designs it has for man.
~ Marquis De Sade - [Philosophers and Philosophy]

Humane sentiments are baseless, mad, and improper; they are incredibly feeble; never do they withstand the gainsaying passions, never do they resist bare necessity.
~ Marquis De Sade - [Pity]

Prejudice is the sole author of infamies: how many acts are so qualified by an opinion forged out of naught but prejudice!
~ Marquis De Sade - [Prejudice]

Every principle is a judgment, every judgment the outcome of experience, and experience is only acquired by the exercise of the senses; whence it follows that religious principles bear upon nothing whatever and are not in the slightest innate. Ignorance and fear, you will repeat to them, ignorance and fear -- those are the twin bases of every religion.
~ Marquis De Sade - [Principles]

Do not breed. Nothing gives less pleasure than childbearing. Pregnancies are damaging to health, spoil the figure, wither the charms, and it's the cloud of uncertainty forever hanging over these events that darkens a husband's mood.
~ Marquis De Sade - [Procreation]

Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.
~ Marquis De Sade - [Punishment]

Religions are the cradles of despotism.
~ Marquis De Sade - [Religion]

Are not laws dangerous which inhibit the passions? Compare the centuries of anarchy with those of the strongest legalism in any country you like and you will see that it is only when the laws are silent that the greatest actions appear.
~ Marquis De Sade - [Law and Lawyers]