Objectifying Quotes

“Sade’s success in our day is explained by the dream that he had in common with contemporary thought: the demand for total freedom, and dehumanization coldly planned by the intelligence. The reduction of man to an object of experiment, the rule that specifies the relation between the will to power and man as an object, the sealed laboratory that is the scene of this monstrous experiment, are lessons which the theoreticians of power will discover again when they come to organizing the age of slavery.
Two centuries ahead of time and on a reduced scale, Sade extolled totalitarian societies in the name of unbridled freedom—which, in reality, rebellion does not demand. The history and the tragedy of our times really begin with him. He only believed that a society founded on freedom of crime must coincide with freedom of morals, as though servitude had its limits. Our times have limited themselves to blending, in a curious manner, his dream of a universal republic and his technique of degradation. Finally, what he hated most, legal murder, has availed itself of the discoveries that he wanted to put to the service of instinctive murder. Crime, which he wanted to be the exotic and delicious fruit of unbridled vice, is no more today than the dismal habit of a police-controlled morality. Such are the surprises of literature.”
― Albert Camus, The Rebel

“Womankind is, in fact, the soup of man,
And when a man perceives that others wish
To dip their dirty fingers into his dish,
His temper flares, and bursts into a flame.”
― Molière, L'Ecole Des Femmes / La Critique de L'Ecole Des Femmes / Remerciment Au Roi / L'Impromptu de Versailles / La Princesse D'Elide

“Delaroche took no pleasure from killing, yet it left him with no remorse. He was trained to carry out assassinations with brutal and mechanical swiftness. The quickness with which he killed insulated him from any guilt or remorse. It was as if someone else were performing the act. He was not the murderer; the men who ordered the death were the real killers. Delaroche was just the weapon: the knife, the gun, the blunt object. If he had not carried out the contract, someone else would have”
― Daniel Silva, The Marching Season