Religions are the cradles of despotism.

Let us give ourselves indiscriminately to everything our passions suggest, and we will always be happy...Conscience is not the voice of Nature but only the voice of prejudice.

It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure.

I've already told you: the only way to a woman's heart is along the path of torment. I know none other as sure.

Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced.

Conversation, like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated.

In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.

My passions, concentrated on a single point, resemble the rays of a sun assembled by a magnifying glass: they immediately set fire to whatever object they find in their way.

Crime is the soul of lust. What would pleasure be if it were not accompanied by crime? It is not the object of debauchery that excites us, rather the idea of evil.

Either kill me or take me as I am, because I'll be damned if I ever change.

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

Human nature, if it changes at all, changes not much faster than the geological face of the earth.

Why seek out the tried and true, instead of experiences that will stretch you?

It's true - I am a bisexual. But I can't deny that I've used that fact very well. I suppose it's the best thing that ever happened to me.

The Rolling Stones set the bar to where I look to as a band. But I don't envision myself touring in the way they do. My knees won't hold out.

The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.

I firmly believe that the Gandhian philosophy of nonviolent resistance is the only logical and moral approach to the solution of the race problem in the United States.

We don't trust anyone who does anything nice. That's just the sad world we live in.

I love my country more than anything. I spent 12 years in the United States Marine Corps. I know what it means to defend this country.

I took a lie detector test the other day. No, I didn't.

O God, I could be bound in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space – were it not that I have bad dreams.