Must We Burn Sade? Quotes

“And there was one dream common to most young aristocrats of the time. Scions of a declining class which had once possessed concrete power, but which no longer retained any real hold on the world, they tried to revive symbolically, in the privacy of the bed chamber, the status for which they were nostalgic: that of the lone and sovereign feudal despot.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, Must We Burn Sade?

“The "evil" which he had made his refuge vanished when crime was justified by virtue.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, Must We Burn Sade?

“He made of his sexuality an ethic; he expressed this ethic in works of literature. It is by this deliberate act that Sade attains a real originality.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, Must We Burn Sade?

“Sade's aberrations begin to acquire value when, instead of enduring them as his fixed nature, he elaborates an immense system in order to justify them.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, Must We Burn Sade?