Marquis de Sade

"No desire can be termed outlandish, my dear; all desires can be found in nature. When nature created human beings, it delighted in differentiating their sexual leanings as much as their faces; and we …"

"No act of possession can be exercised on a free being; it is an unjust to own a wife monogamously as it is to own slaves. All men are born free, all are equal before the law; we must never lose sight …"

"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."

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

"What do I see in the God of this infamous cult but a barbaric and inconsistent being, who creates a world one day, then repents its construction the next day? What do I see but a weak being who can ne…"

"Lycurgus, Numa, Moses, Jesus Christ, Muhammad—all these great scoundrels, all these big despots of our ideas knew how to bond their concocted divinities with their immense ambitions. Certain of captiv…"

"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 pr…"

"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,…"