Wit & Attitude Quote by Marquis de Sade

De Sade doesn’t defend his thinking; he spits on the very premise that it needs defending. The opening line stages a familiar social ritual - the polite verdict from “you,” the implied jury of taste, morality, and acceptability. Then he snaps the script in half: “Do you suppose I care?” It’s contempt as a philosophy, a refusal to grant society the power to certify what is “approved” thought.

The real sting lands in the last sentence. De Sade isn’t merely claiming independence; he’s indicting conformity as stupidity. “A poor fool” isn’t someone who thinks wrongly, but someone who rents out their mind to maintain comfort, status, or safety. The subtext is that public morality is less a shared ethic than a disciplinary system: it trains people to pre-censor themselves, to anticipate disapproval and adjust accordingly. He’s challenging not only what people believe, but why they believe it - and who benefits from that arrangement.

Context matters because de Sade’s posture wasn’t theoretical. He wrote as an aristocrat repeatedly imprisoned and scandalized, a man whose work deliberately antagonized the era’s moral and political authorities. This line channels the Enlightenment’s obsession with reason and autonomy, then drags it into darker territory: if your thinking is truly your own, you may end up beyond the boundary of what society can tolerate. The quote works because it turns rejection into proof of integrity, and approval into a suspect reward.