My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking to suit other people! My manner of thinking stems straight from my considered reflections; it holds with my existence, with the way I am made. It is not in my power to alter it; and were it, I'd not do so.

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 horror of wedlock, the most appalling, the most loathsome of all the bonds humankind has devised for its own discomfort and degradation.

Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all.

To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.

They declaim against the passions without bothering to think that it is from their flame philosophy lights its torch.

Are wars anything but the means whereby a nation is nourished, whereby it is strengthened, whereby it is buttressed?