“...your service will be arduous, it will be painful and rigorous, and the slightest delinquencies will be requited immediately with corporal and afflicting punishments; hence, I must recommend to you prompt exactness, submissiveness, and total self-abnegation that you be enabled to heed naught but our desires; let them be your laws, fly to do their bidding, anticipate them, cause them to be born...”

“The completest submissiveness is your lot, and that is all;”

“I assumed that everything must yield to me, that the entire universe had to flatter my whims, and that I had the right to satisfy them at will.”

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

“One must do violence to the object of one's desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater.”

“The law which attempts a man's life [capital punishment] is impractical, unjust, inadmissible. It has never repressed crime--for a second crime is every day committed at the foot of the scaffold.”

“Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge, are all founded on lust.”