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

We are no guiltier in following the primative impulses that govern us than is the Nile for her floods or the sea for her waves.

Chimerical and empty being, your name alone has caused more blood to flow on the face of the earth than any political war ever will. Return to the nothingness from which the mad hope and ridiculous fright of men dared call you forth to their misfortune. You only appeared as a torment for the human race. What crimes would have been spared the world, if they had choked the first imbecile who thought of speaking of you.

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.

Beauty belongs to the sphere of the simple, the ordinary, whilst ugliness is something extraordinary, and there is no question but that every ardent imagination prefers in lubricity, the extraordinary to the commonplace

Crime is to the passions what nervous fluid is to life: it sustains them, it supplies their strength.

No lover, if he be of good faith, and sincere, will deny he would prefer to see his mistress dead than unfaithful.