Politics & Power Quote by Marquis de Sade

Leave it to de Sade to take a pious civic slogan and twist it until the blood shows. The line is phrased as a polite, almost bureaucratic question, but it’s a trap: by stacking “nourished,” “strengthened,” and “buttressed,” he mimics the soothing cadence of state propaganda while smuggling in a savage premise-that war isn’t a regrettable exception to politics but the very diet politics runs on. The rhetorical move is surgical: if you accept the nation as an organism, then war becomes nutrition. If you accept war as nutrition, then slaughter becomes policy’s natural metabolism.

The intent isn’t to cheerlead conflict so much as to indict the moral alchemy that makes it sound wholesome. De Sade’s cynicism lands because he refuses the usual euphemisms (honor, duty, destiny) and instead chooses the language of upkeep and architecture. “Buttressed” is especially telling: war as structural support, as if a state’s legitimacy requires periodic violence the way a building requires beams. That’s not just provocation; it’s a theory of power delivered as mock common sense.

Context matters. De Sade writes in the long shadow of absolutist France and the revolutionary wars-a world where the state’s appetite for bodies was obvious, and the rhetoric of virtue often masked coercion. His subtext: the nation is not a family; it’s a machine that fortifies itself through sanctioned cruelty. The question mark is the joke. He’s not asking. He’s daring you to deny it.