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

Get it into your head once and for all, my simple and very fainthearted fellow, that what fools call humanness is nothing but a weakness born of fear and egoism; that this chimerical virtue, enslaving only weak men, is unknown to those whose character is formed by stoicism, courage, and philosophy.

At all times, in every century, every age, there has been such a connection between despotism and religion that it is infinitely apparent and demonstrated a thousand times over, that in destroying one, the other must be undermined, for the simple reason that the first will always put the law into the service of the second.

Sex without pain is like food without taste

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

Don't have children: they deform women's bodies and turn into an enemy 20 years later.

Sex is as important as eating or drinking and we ought to allow the one appetite to be satisfied with as little restraint or false modesty as the other.