Juliette (SADE, Marquis de)

The Marquis de Sade did not invent sadism, which has always existed, but he discovered it, like a great doctor discovers a virus. . . Sade made us discover that the sexual instinct is anarchic and uncontrollable. After Sade, we no longer think of sex as something light, playful and superficial." —Maurice Lever The New York Times Book Review

"Sade was one of the most radical minds of Western history, one that touched, with an astonishing fusion of madness and cold rationality, on some of the most central aspects of psychic life. . . He remains a great, horrifying, but also vastly illuminating figure." —Newsweek

"Sade speaks with loudest voice to our own time, and through our own time, for it is our age that has had to live the truths he revealed, to live through the night he uncovered." —Lester G. Crocker

"It is not necessary to take the Marquis seriously as a philosopher of total freedom, as some do, in order to relish the imagination and talent that went into gilding the nuggets of naughtiness contained here." —Playboy

"Mlle. de Maupin, Lolita, Candy—all pale beside Juliette." —Library Journal