Wit & Attitude Quote by Marquis de Sade

De Sade doesn’t flirt with misogyny here; he weaponizes it. The line is engineered to shock by yoking “destiny” (a word of Providence and natural law) to “wanton” (a moral slur) and then sealing the claim with animal imagery: “bitch, the she-wolf.” It’s not just insult. It’s a rhetorical move that strips women of social personhood and reclassifies them as biological resource: available, fungible, owned by appetite. The closing clause - “she must belong to all who claim her” - turns desire into property law. “Claim” sounds procedural, almost legalistic, as if consent is irrelevant once a man asserts a right.

The subtext is de Sade’s favorite provocation: if society can justify domination through “nature,” then cruelty can be framed as honesty. He’s writing in a late-Enlightenment world that loved to talk about reason and rights while still running on patriarchy, class violence, and sexual double standards. His novels often take those hypocrisies and push them past the breaking point, staging libertine philosophy as a nightmare logic test: what happens when pleasure is the only sovereign?

That doesn’t make the sentence a critique rather than an endorsement. De Sade’s fiction repeatedly eroticizes coercion, and this formulation reads less like satire than a manifesto of predation dressed up as inevitability. The intent is to collapse moral argument into a sneer: women are “meant” for use, so resistance becomes unnatural. It “works” because it’s brutally consistent - and because its brutality exposes how easily lofty talk of destiny can be conscripted to excuse exploitation.