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.

Nature has endowed each of us with a capacity for kindly feelings: let us not squander them on others.

If God permits virtue to be persecuted on earth, it is not for us to question his intentions. It may be that his rewards are held over for another life, for is it not true as written in Holy Scripture that the Lord chastenenth only the righteous! And after all, is not virtue it's own reward?

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.

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.

You say that my way of thinking cannot be tolerated? What of it? The man who alters his way of thinking to suit othere is a fool. My way of thinking is the result of my reflections. It is part of my inner being,the way I am made. I do not contradict them, and would not even if I wished to. For my system, which you disapprove of is also my greatest comfort in life, the source of all my happiness -it means more to me than my life itself.

Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all. The infant breaks his toy, bites his nurse's breast, strangles his canary long before he is able to reason; cruelty is stamped in animals, in whom, as I think I have said, Nature's laws are more emphatically to be read than in ourselves; cruelty exists amongst savages, so much nearer to Nature than civilized men are; absurd then to maintain cruelty is a consequence of depravity. . . . Cruelty is simply the energy in a man civilization has not yet altogether corrupted: therefore it is a virtue, not a vice.