The practice of S/M is the creation of pleasure.... And that's why S/M is really a subculture. It's a process of invention. S/M isthe use of a strategic relationship as a source of pleasure.

You know the difference between a real science and a pseudoscience? A real science recognizes and accepts its own history without feeling attacked. When you tell a psychiatrist his mental institution came from a lazar house, he becomes infuriated.

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.

What desire can be contrary to nature since it was given to man by nature itself?

The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body

To work is to undertake to think something other than what one has thought before