Маркиз де Сад цитаты

„Те, кто считаются всеведущими, нерешительны в миг, когда надо повелевать и строптивы, когда надо повиноваться. Отдавать приказы – им стыдно, получать их – бесчестье.“

„Идея Бога – это единственное вранье, которого я не могу простить человечеству.“

„Не существует ни одного живущего человека, которому не захотелось бы сыграть деспота, если он обладает твердым характером.“

„Человек может познать свою суть, лишь дойдя до последней черты.“

„Если Бог создал все, отсюда следует, что он также создал добро и зло, включая то, что считается греховной природой человека.“

„Чтение этих книг убедило меня, что законы нравственности являются относительными, обусловлены географическим положением и социальным устройством.“

„Тирания и религиозные предрассудки были взращены в одной и той же колыбели, они в равной мере дети фанатизма, им равно служили и эти бесполезные создания, которые известны всем как священники, и монарх на троне: имея общую основу, они неизбежно будут защищать друг друга.“

„Каждый из нас представляет себе Рай как прекрасное общество, полное чудесной вседозволенности, абсолютно лишенное каких-либо запретов. Но никто не догадывается, что и в Раю могут быть свои жестокие правила.“

„Быть оклеветанным — это то испытание на чистоту, из которого добродетельный человек выходит незапятнанным.“

„Вы всегда найдете злодеяния, которые измеряются не силой нанесенного оскорбления, а ранимостью агрессора. И вот вам объяснение того, что богатство и высокое положение всегда правы, а милосердие всегда виновато.“

„Можно заменить кровати, столы и комоды, но только не идеи. Их потеря невосполнима.“

„Бессердечность богатых узаконивает дурное поведение бедных.“

„Если действует материя, если Природа сама, за счет собственной энергии, способна создавать, производить, сохранять, поддерживать… то для чего искать какую-то постороннюю силу?“

„Это ново, потому что я представляю порок торжествующим, а добродетель — его жертвой, подверженной всем формам унижения и жестокости, но наделенной единственно чувствительной душой, чтобы противостоять этим опасностям.“

„Люди осуждают страсти, забывая, что философия зажигает свой факел от их огня.“

„Не только добродетель необходима природе и, наоборот, не только в преступлении она нуждается, но и утверждает себя в совершенном равновесии между тем и другим. В этом состоит ее бесконечная мудрость. Но можем ли мы быть виновны, добавляя то к одной, то к другой стороне, когда она сама располагает нас на своей шкале?“

„Письма вечного узника“

„Я, вполне естественно, заинтересован в том, чтобы существовало законное право для всех форм сексуального поведения, к которым я сам склонен и которые определяются природным импульсами.“

“The Duke soon imitated his old friend's little infamy and wagered that, enormous as Invictus' prick might be, he could calmly down three bottles of wine while lying embuggered upon it.”

“You charming sex, you will be free; like men, you will enjoy all the delights that nature has made your obligations; you will not have to be constrained in any pleasure. Must the more divine section of humanity be clapped in irons by the less divine section? Ah, smash those chains—nature wants you to smash them! You should have no other limits than your leanings, no other laws than your cravings, no other morals than nature; stop languishing in those barbaric prejudices that caused your charms to fade and imprisoned the godly surges of your hearts.”

“I am a libertine, but I am not a criminal nor a murderer, and since I am compelled to set my apology alongside my vindication, I shall therefore say that it might well be possible that those who condemn me as unjustly as I have been might themselves be unable to offset the infamies by good works as clearly established as those I can contrast to my errors. I am a libertine, but three families residing in your area have for five years lived off my charity, and I have saved them from the farthest depths of poverty. I am a libertine, but I have saved a deserter from death, a deserter abandoned by his entire regiment and by his colonel. I am a libertine, but at Evry, with your whole family looking on, I saved a child—at the risk of my life—who was on the verge of being crushed beneath the wheels of a runaway horse-drawn cart, by snatching the child from beneath it. I am a libertine, but I have never compromised my wife’s health. Nor have I been guilty of the other kinds of libertinage so often fatal to children’s fortunes: have I ruined them by gambling or by other expenses that might have deprived them of, or even by one day foreshortened, their inheritance? Have I managed my own fortune badly, as long as I have had a say in the matter? In a word, did I in my youth herald a heart capable of the atrocities of which I today stand accused?… How therefore do you presume that, from so innocent a childhood and youth, I have suddenly arrived at the ultimate of premeditated horror? No, you do not believe it. And yet you who today tyrannize me so cruelly, you do not believe it either: your vengeance has beguiled your mind, you have proceeded blindly to tyrannize, but your heart knows mine, it judges it more fairly, and it knows full well it is innocent.”

“The law which attempts a man's life [capital punishment] is impractical, unjust, inadmissible. It has never repressed crime—for a second crime is every day committed at the foot of the scaffold.”

“Why do you complain of your fate when you could so easily change it?”

“The Duc, pike aloft, closed in upon Augustine; he brayed, he swore, he waxed unreasonable, and the poor little thing, all atremble, retreated like a dove before the bird of prey ready to pounce upon it.”

“Lewd women, let the voluptuous Saint-Ange be your model; after her example, be heedless of all that contradicts pleasure's divine laws, by which all her life she was enchained.”

“Our four libertines, half-drunk but nonetheless resolved to abide their laws, contented themselves with kisses, fingerings, but their libertine intelligence knew how to season these mild activities with all the refinements of debauch and lubricity.”

“Nothing we can do outrages Nature directly. Our acts of destruction give her new vigour and feed her energy, but none of our wreckings can weaken her power.”

“Voluptuaries of all ages, of every sex, it is to you only that I offer this work; nourish yourselves upon its principles: they favor your passions, and these passions, whereof coldly insipid moralists put you in fear, are naught but the means Nature employs to bring man to the ends she prescribes to him; harken only to these delicious promptings, for no voice save that of the passions can conduct you to happiness.”

“You young maidens, too long constrained by a fanciful Virtue's absurd and dangerous bonds and by those of a disgusting religion, imitate the fiery Eugénie; be as quick as she to destroy, to spurn all those ridiculous precepts inculcated in you by imbecile parents.”

“The philosopher must teach these pupils [French students] that it is far less essential to understand nature than to enjoy and respect its laws; that these laws are both wise and simple; that they are written in all human hearts, and that one need merely question a heart in order to appreciate its impulses.”

“…there is a sum of evil equal to the sum of good, the continuing equilibrium of the world requires that there be as many good people as wicked people…”

“And you, amiable debauchees, you who since youth have known no limits but those of your desires and who have been governed by your caprices alone, study the cynical Dolmancé, proceed like him and go as far as he if you too would travel the length of those flowered ways your lechery prepares for you; in Dolmancé's academy be at last convinced it is only by exploring and enlarging the sphere of his tastes and whims, it is only by sacrificing everything to the senses' pleasure that this individual, who never asked to be cast into this universe of woe, that this poor creature who goes under the name of Man, may be able to sow a smattering of roses atop the thorny path of life.”

“Lycurgus, Numa, Moses, Jesus Christ, Muhammad—all these big scoundrels, all these big despots of our ideas knew how to bond their concocted divinities with their immense ambitions. Certain of captivating nations with the sanction of their gods, these villains, as we know, took care either to question their deities at an appropriate moment or to have them answer only whatever they believed could serve their purpose.”

“Let us believing that religion can be useful to man. Instead, let us have good laws, and we can then do without religion.”

“Never will a free man bow to the gods of Christianity; never will its dogmas, never will its rites, never its mysteries, never its morals be suitable for a republican.”

“The total annihilation of divine worship, which we are spreading through Europe. We should not be content with shattering scepters, we must smash idols forever. There has never been more than one step from superstition to royalism.”

“Survey the histories of all nations. You will never see them exchange their form of government for a monarchy, given their gradation by superstition; you will always see kings supporting religion, and religion supporting kings.”

“Oh, you, who are clutching the sickle, give the tree of superstition its final stroke. Do not be content with hacking off the branches. Tear outby its roots a plant with such noxious effects.”

“Benevolence is more a vice of pride than a true virtue of the soul.”

“Modesty is an old-fashioned virtue, which, given your charms, you must certainly do without.”

“After demonstrating that theism is unsuitable for a republican government, I find it crucial to prove that French morals are likewise inappropriate.”

“The first of these blessed charlatans to talk about God or religion will be condemned to being jeered at, scoffed at, covered with mud at all crossroads of the major French towns. If that scoundrel breaks that same law a second time, he will be locked away in an eternal prison. Let the most insulting blasphemies, the most atheistic writings be fully authorized, so that we may completely extirpate those horrifying toys of our childhoods from human hearts and memories. Let us hold a contest to find at last the text most capable of Enlightening Europeans about such a major subject; and let a substantial prize be established by the Nation as recompense for the man who, having said and proved everything about his theme, will leave his compatriots only a sickle to shatter all these phantoms and a straightforward heart to detest them.”

“Let nobody doubt that religions are the cradles of despotism. The first of all despots was a priest; the first king and the first emperor of Rome, Numa and Augustus, both allied themselves with the priesthood; Constantine and Clovis were abbots rather than sovereigns; Heliopolis was the priest of the sun. In all times, in all centuries, despotism and religion have been so thoroughly interconnected that, as is easily demonstrated, in destroying one you undermine the other, for the profound reason that each will help the other to gain power.”

“All our ideas are representations of the objects that affect our senses; then what can be represented by the idea of God, which is obviously an idea without an object? Isn't such an idea, or will add, as impossible as effects without causes? Isn't an idea without a prototype anything but a chimera? Some Doctors of the Church, you will continue, assure us that the notion of God is innate, and that a man already has this notion in his mother's womb. But that is wrong, you will add; every principle is a judgement, every judgement is the result of experience, and experience can be gained only through the exercise of the senses. And it thereby follows that religious principles are obviously based on nothing and are not innate at all. How, you will go on, could anyone persuade rational beings that the hardest thing to grasp was the most essential thing for them? They were terrified; and when you are terrified, you are no longer rational. Above all, they were told to distrust their reasoning; and when the brains are muddled, you believe everything and examine nothing. Fear and ignorance, you will continue, are two mainstays of any and all religions.”

“What good are laws without a religion? We need a religion so distant to that of Rome that we can never return to the religion of Rome. In this century we are furthermore convinced that religion must be based on morality and not morality on religion. Hence we require a reliigion that is faithful to morals, that is virtually their further development, their necessary consequence, and that, in uplifting the soul, can perpetually keep it on the acme of that precious freedom which is now its unique idol.”

“A person must have lost his mind to believe in God. The product of either fear or weakness, this abominable phantom, Eugenie, is useless for the system of the earth, It would even be infallibly harmful. You see, its will, which must be just, could never ally itself with the injustice essential to the laws of nature. It would constantly have to wish for goodness, which nature desires only as compensation for the evil that serves its laws. It would have to act continuously, and nature, one of whose laws is that perpetual motion, could only rival and perpetually resist it.”

“We must pity those who have such singular tastes, but never insult them: their lack is a lack in nature. They are no more the masters of arriving in this world with bizarre tastes that we are the masters of arriving bowlegged or shapely. Besides, is a man saying something disagreeable to you when he reveals his desire to enjoy you? Absolutely not! He's paying you a compliment!”