De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.

The best way to find things out is not to ask questions at all. If you fire off a question, it is like firing off a gun - bang it goes

Why should human females become sterile in their forties, while female crocodiles continue to lay eggs into their third century?

Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.

The place is good. How good, one must have circumnavigated the globe to discover. Why not stay? Take root? But roots are chains. I have a terror of losing my freedom. Free, without ties, unpossessed by any possessions, free to do as one will, to go at a moment's notice wherever the fancy may suggest--it is good. But so is this place. Might it not be better? To gain freedom one sacrifices something [...] and all that these things and people signify. One sacrifices something--for a greater gain in knowledge, in understanding, in intensified living? I sometimes wonder.

The question of the next generation will not be one of how to liberate the masses, but rather, how to make them love their servitude.

Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.