Quotes & Sayings About Sadism

Sadism dominates the culture. It runs like an electric current through reality television and trash-talk programs, is at the core of pornography, and fuels the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice and diminishing the individual to force him or her into an ostensibly harmonious collective. This hypermasculinity has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our lack of compassion for our homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed, and the sick ... We accept the system handed to us and seek to find a comfortable place within it. We retreat into the narrow, confined ghettos created for us and shut our eyes to the deadly superstructure of the corporate state. — Chris Hedges

When blended with sexuality, the death instinct is transformed into more harmless impulses expressed in sadism or masochism. — Erich Fromm

They burn books now, mama.The monsters burn fucking books now, mama. They have eyes full of disappointing madness. Their tongues taste like fulvous indoctrination. They teach us. Teach us sadism, hatred, lust to kill, conformity. What do you see when you look at me? Daddy? — Laura Gentile

Every death even the cruelest death
drowns in the total indifference of Nature
Nature herself would watch unmoved
if we destroyed the entire human race
I hate Nature
this passionless spectator this unbreakable iceberg-face
that can bear everything
this goads us to greater and greater acts — Peter Weiss

[At the scene of a murder]
The cats' bloodthirst was normal; it was the way God had made them. They were hunters, they killed for food and to train their young
well maybe sometimes for sport. But this violent act by some unknown human had nothing to do with hunting
for a human to brutally maim one of the own kind out of rage or sadism or greed was, to Joe and Dulcie (the cats), a shocking degradation of the human condition. To imagine that vicious abandon in a human deeply distressed Dulcie; she did not like thinking about humans that way. — Shirley Rousseau Murphy

There began to appear before my romantic eyes ... a vast and complicated network of espionage, terror, sadism and hate, from which no one, official or private, could escape. — Erik Larson

He was opposed to capital punishment - "institutionalized sadism," he termed it - and in favor of prison reforms that would emphasize rehabilitation. His opinions were generally conservative, however, and he did not subscribe to the fashionable view of the sixties that criminals were victims of society. — Gerald Clarke

... everyone knew that sin was evil, and that no good could come from evil. But he did feel good; he felt positively marvellous. Consequently, it followed logically that telling lies and defecting from duty could not be sins. The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy technique of protective rationalisation, and he was exhilarated by his discovery. It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honour, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. — Joseph Heller

All is fair in love and sadism. — Tiffany Reisz

Roy's key finding was DeBardeleben's criminal sexual sadism. For such offenders, sex and suffering are one and the same. This perversion, or paraphilia, is surprisingly unusual, even among sexual criminals. But those who harbor it are the most dangerous of all aberrant offenders. They are the great white sharks of deviant crime, marked by their wildly complex fantasy worlds, unequaled criminal cunning, paranoia, insatiable sexual hunger, and enormous capacity for destruction." ... "The crimes are fantasies being acted out. The more complex the crime, the more complex the fantasy and the more intelligent the offender.
— Roy Hazelwood

Poems should be like pins which prick the skin of boredom and leave a glow equal in its pride to the gate of the sadist who stuck the pin and walked away — Norman Mailer

Pornography is the essential sexuality of male power: of hate, of ownership, of hierarchy; of sadism, of dominance. — Andrea Dworkin

Nor do I like being told upsetting news - unless there is a good reason. I can't help but feel that there is an element of cruelty, if not sadism, in friends telling one another upsetting things for no reason except to observe their reactions. — Joyce Carol Oates

Chickenshit refers to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant 'paying off of old scores'; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances. — Paul Fussell

Homicide is not a sin. It is sometimes a necessary violence on resistant and ossified forms of existence which have ceased to be amusing. In the interests of an important and fascinating experiment, it can even become meritorious. Here is the starting point of a new apologia for sadism. — Bruno Schulz

The ditties blend Japanese popular culture themes of saccharine, childlike goodness and viciously detached sadism, which Aum drew upon as it tapped the barely suppressed rage of the young against their society. — Robert Jay Lifton

Even the most sadistic and destructive man is human, as human as the saint. — Erich Fromm

Anger should be expressed. - Any anger that is not coming out, flowing freely, will turn into sadism, power drive, stammering, and other means of torturing. — Bruce Lee

Was it boredom or sadism that made the shirt service people do up every single button? — Ian McEwan

Ana was a perpetual victim in a never-ending search for a victimizer. — Travis Luedke

Once it was the fashion to represent villages as places inhabited by laughable, livable simpletons, unspotted by the worldliness of city life, though occasionally shrewd in rural concerns. Later it was the popular thing to show villages as rotten with vice, and especially such sexual vice ... incest, sodomy, bestiality, sadism, and masochism were supposed to rage behind lace curtains and in the haylofts, while a rigid piety was professed in the streets. — Robertson Davies

Once, in a three-day taping that included several sadists, the material was so overwhelming that both the film crew and I got sick - I with a sinus infection, and the entire film crew with a flu so severe they had to delay their departure from the motel. Our immune systems had weakened, I believe, from the beating out souls had taken. — Anna C. Salter

The wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings. The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others. When men and women punish each other for truth telling, we reinforce the notion that lies are better. To be loving we willingly hear the other's truth, and most important, we affirm the value of truth telling. Lies may make people feel better, but they do not help them to know love. — Bell Hooks

Black-and-white chickens stagger around Colonial Dunsboros, chickens with their heads flattened. Here are chickens with no wings or only one leg. There are chickens with no legs, swimming with just their ragged wings through the barnyard mud. Blind chickens without eyes. Without beaks. Born that way. Defective. Born with their little chicken brains already scrambled. There's an invisible line between science and sadism, but here it's made visible. — Chuck Palahniuk

Why will the Structure allow every other kind of sexual behavior but that one? Because submission and dominance are resources it needs for its very survival. They cannot be wasted in private sex. In any kind of sex. It needs our submission so that it can co-opt us into its own power game. There is no joy in it, only power. I tell you, if S and M could be established universally, at the family level, the State would wither away. — Thomas Pynchon

Pornography incarnates male supremacy. It is the DNA of male dominance. Every rule of sexual abuse, every nuance of sexual sadism, every highway and byway of sexual exploitation, is encoded in it. — Andrea Dworkin

I hated the brutality, the sadism, and the insanity of Nazism. I just couldn't stand by and see people destroyed. I did what I could, what I had to do, what my conscience told me I must do. That's all there is to it. Really, nothing more. — Oskar Schindler

Pleasure is sweetest when 'tis paid for by another's pain. — Ovid

Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism. — Cesare Pavese

The Thing about people who wanted to show you things was that sometimes their interest in granting you knowledge was laced with a little voyeuristic sadism. They were waiting for the Look or the Reaction, and they didn't care what it was so long as it inflicted some kind of discomfort. — Jeff VanderMeer

Imagine: in the medieval ages, there was no evidence of how the history of mankind has been affected by witchcraft. But there is significant factual history of how brutality and sadism of mankind have been displayed in the most obscene manner in the name of witch-hunt. — Kangana Ranaut

Take off your damned wrapper! The old buffer ordered, looking intensely at her lower part. Comfort was on her knees, rubbing the old man's dirty feet.
All her plea and tears continually worsen the whole matter.
I want to do you harder cos you gonna be fucked by other folks who needs a large hole, said the man, moving towards her.
Comfort struggled with all her feminine might, but the old masculine but old man ripped her wrapper and slapped her on the face.
Lie here, Lie here! I'm gonna do what your old man did to your mama and its gonna sweet you.
She screamed as the man's organ prick her glory hole like a sharp needle. — Michael Bassey Johnson

A range of reasons to go with a range of individuals, my dear: some wish to restore lost glories, some wish to alter the status quo, some wish to bring harm to others. In my case I do it for the most personal of reasons - because I like it and because I can. — Andy Chambers

How shall I typify what happened? Passion play? Somewhat. Weird tale? Indubitably. Horror story? Pretty close. Grotesque melodrama? Certainly. Black comedy? Your point of view will determine that. Perhaps it was a combination of them all ...
So, to the story. A chronicle of greed and cruelty, horror and rapacity, sadism and murder.
Love, American style. — Richard Matheson

When we begin to take responsibility for our multi-bio-dimensional inner nature ... when we begin to see AND understand both the angel and the devil within us, and endless other tendencies and qualities, from sexual capacity to artistic and intellectual potential, from sadism to masochism, from gentleness and tenderness to roughness and brutality, from heart to heartlessness, from selflessness to selfishness, from kindness to hatred - only then do we begin to manifest our human fullness. It is ONLY at that point, fully human, that we are capable of becoming something more ... as in metamorphosis ... something born within from the opposites. — Christopher Zzenn Loren

Unkindness is inspired by hatred, anger fuels it into action in which there is no great joy; it would take sadism to turn it into something pleasurable; unkind people imagine themselves to be inflicting pain on someone equally unkind. — Marcel Proust

Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.
Faith is something very different from belief. Belief is the systematic taking of unanalyzed words much too seriously. Paul's words, Mohammed's words, Marx's words, Hitler's words
people take them too seriously, and what happens? What happens is the senseless ambivalence of history
sadism versus duty, or (incomparably worse) sadism as duty; devotion counterbalanced by organized paranoia; sisters of charity selflessly tending the victims of their own church's inquisitors and crusaders. Faith, on the contrary, can never be taken too seriously. For Faith is the empirically justified confidence in our capacity to know who in fact we are, to forget the belief-intoxicated Manichee in Good Being. — Aldous Huxley

Not long ago the world looked on the dark ages with contempt for its brutality, yet here it is again, in full force, a lawless sadism unpolished by all the charms of religion and civilization." Sitting — Diane Ackerman

The Nazis, for him, are merely available movie tropes
articulate monsters with a talent for sadism. By making the Americans cruel, too, he escapes the customary division of good and evil along national lines, but he escapes any sense of moral accountability as well. In a Tarantino war, everyone commits atrocities. Like all the director's work after 'Jackie Brown,' the movie is pure sensation. It's disconnected from feeling, and an eerie blankness
it's too shallow to be called nihilism
undermines even the best scenes. — David Denby

Any man who has ever led an army, an expedition, or a group of Boy Scouts has sadism in his bones. — Tahir Shah

I cannot be with someone who takes pleasure in inflicting pain on me, someone who can't love me. — E.L. James

In his experience, motives were simple. There was greed, there was jealousy, he'd seen plenty of revenge played out in gang-related crimes, there was even sadism, and sometimes there was flat-out stupidity, which was a pretty powerful motivator in itself. — Jonathan L. Howard

I knew about the terrorism of the human spirit and understood that ruthless, immoral forces had planted alien flags in my soul. The plebe system gave cruelty a good name, disguised sadism in the severe raiment of duty. — Pat Conroy

All that is called sadistic is not so. It is called sadistic in comparison to what is regarded as normal which has yet not been defined correctly. — Harshit Walia

A cross between a foreign legion boot-camp and a secret-society initiation ritual, the ordeals were grounded in pain. One thing was obvious: the agenda, which was dedicated to grave discomfort, had been drawn up by a passionate sadist. — Tahir Shah

Look at us. We build giant highways and murderously fast cars for killing each other and committing suicide. Instead of bomb shelters we construct gigantic frail glass buildings all over Manhattan at Ground Zero, a thousand feet high, open to the sky, life a woman undressing before an intruder and provoking him to rape her. We ring Russia's borders with missile-launching pads, and then scream that she's threatening us. In all history there's never been a more lurid mass example of the sadist-masochist expression of the thanatos instinct than the present conduct of the United States. The Nazis by comparison were Eagle Scouts. — Herman Wouk

Such a brute should underneath all his braggart tricks, his viciousness, his vileness, be a coward. But I am convinced that he was not. Because even cowardice requires a certain degree of sensitivity, and a certain value for life. — Warren Eyster

Tears gratify a savage nature, they do not melt it. — Publilius Syrus

And this urge to run away from what I love is a sort of sadism I no longer pretend to understand. — Martha Gellhorn

Sadists of Mlle Vinteuil's sort are creatures so purely sentimental, so naturally virtuous, that even sensual pleasure appears to them as something bad, the prerogative of the wicked. And when they allow themselves for a moment to enjoy it they endeavour to impersonate, to identify with, the wicked, and to make their partners do likewise, in order to gain the momentary illusion of having escaped beyond the control of their own gentle and scrupulous natures into the inhuman world of pleasure. — Marcel Proust

Sexual deviance, sadism, masochism, homosexuality, coprophagy, coprolalia, voyeurism - the list was endless. — Paulo Coelho

Unfortunately they failed to appreciate the best part of you, preferring to lose themselves in the labyrinth of your grosser illusions. Didn't I show our well-behaved audience an angelized version of you? And you saw their reaction. They were bored and just sat in their seats like a bunch of stiffs. Of course, what can you expect? They wanted the death stuff, the pain stuff. All that flashy junk. They wanted cartwheels of agonized passion; somersaults into fires of doom; nosedives, if you will, into the frenzied pageant of vulnerable flesh. They wanted a tangible thrill.
("Drink To Me Only With Labyrinthine Eyes") — Thomas Ligotti

I'm offering you my pain. My blood. My pleasure. I'm offering you the right to whip and fuck. To debase and harm. I'm offering to fight your needs with my own. I'm willing to join you in the darkness and find pleasure in excruciating pain. I'm willing to be your monster, Q. — Pepper Winters

It is above all man's social position that decides whether he will sublimate his sadism as a butcher, surgeon, or policeman. — Wilhelm Reich

The sadism is part of your charm. - William Maddox — Jennifer DeLucy

The crowd laughs at the parody. Weep, ladies, over your own fate, when you see the misery of imprisoned matter, of tortured matter which does not know what it is and why it is, nor where the gesture may lead that has been imposed on it forever.
The crowd laughs. Do you understand the terrible sadism, the exhilarating, demiurgical cruelty of that laughter? Yet we should weep, ladies, at our own fate, when we see that misery of violated matter, against which a terrible wrong had been committed. — Bruno Schulz

There is no rest for the humble except in despising the great, whose only thought of the people is inspired by self-interest or sadism. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Sadism ... is a massive cultural fact that appeared precisely at the end of the eighteenth century and that constitutes one of the greatest conversions of the occidental imagination ... madness of desire, the insane delight of love and death in the limitless presumption of appetite. — Michel Foucault

My main nurturing instinct toward children is mild sadism
picking them up and threatening to drop them
which is why I am a good uncle but would make a poor father. — Thomm Quackenbush

Next to her a calico cat puffed away at a hubble-bubble. Puss's watch cost more than his vest, and his vest cost more than his boots, and his boots cost more than a house. If you stripped him naked and sold off his costume, you'd walk away with enough money to retire - though if you left him alive you wouldn't have long to enjoy it. The only thing that could rival Puss's vanity was his sadism. — Daniel Polansky

And when he ran the blades over her she felt light as a feather, floating happily into that place where pain and pleasure walked hand in hand, fully clear and conscious and she looked out to the darkness that lay outside of their artificial day. All too soon it was gone, her vision dimming and her breaths evening as she found somewhere darker which centred around the golden light of her Master's voice as he spoke to her. — Astrid Knowles

The longer it takes me to track you down, the more hope you have of escaping. — Peter Watts

These political passions are born of a hunger so deep that it touches on the spiritual. Or they were for me, and they still are. I want my life to be a battle cry, a war zone, an arrow pointed and loosed into the heart of domination: patriarchy, imperialism, industrialization, every system of power and sadism. If the martial imagery alienates you, I can rephrase it. I want my lifemy bodyto be the place where the earth is cherished not devoured, where the sadist is granted no quarter, where the violence stops. — Lierre Keith

David set his foot in a gap higher up the barbed wire ... When would the searchlight come?They could not be certain of hitting him in the dark ... and if they did not hurry, he would be over ... Why didn't they hurry up. Then he stopped. He would run no more.When the beam of light caught him,they should see him walking away quite calmly. Then they would not enjoy it so much; they would feel cheated. The thought filled David with triumph. I am David — Anne Holm

The suppression of natural sexual gratification leads to various kinds of substitute gratifications. Natural aggression, for example, becomes brutal sadism which then is an essential mass-psychological factor in imperialistic wars. — Wilhelm Reich

In 1963 ... The Vatican condemned Dr. No as a 'dangerous mixture of violence, vulgarity, sadism and sex.' Ka-ching! — Manohla Dargis

I thought I understood his kind: the petty bureaucrats of tyranny, men who relish the carefully measured meed of power permitted to them, who need to walk in the aura of manufactured fear, to know that the fear precedes them as they enter a room and will linger like a smell after they have left, but who have neither the sadism nor the courage for the ultimate cruelty. But they need their part of the action. It isn't sufficient for them, as it is for most of us, to stand a little way off to watch the crosses on the hill. — P.D. James

One time I took my knife and sliced off the end of a hog's nose, just like a piece of salami. The hog went crazy for a few seconds. Then it sat there looking kind of stupid. So I took a handful of salt and rubbed it on the wound. Now that hog really went nuts. It was my way of taking out frustration. Another time, there was a live hog in the pit. It hadn't done anything wrong, wasn't even running around. It was just alive. I took a three-foot chunk of pipe and I literally beat that hog to death. It was like I started hitting the hog and I couldn't stop. And when I finally did stop, I'd expended all this energy and frustration, and I'm thinking what in God's sweet name did I do. — Gail A. Eisnitz

Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls. — Emile M. Cioran

The sadist desires to command and control. The masochist desires to be freed from the burdens of liberty. That is Socialism. — A.E. Samaan

Many governments employ torture but this was the first time that the element of Saturnalia and pornography in the process had been made so clear to me. If you care to imagine what any inadequate or cruel man might do, given unlimited power over a woman, then anything that you can bring yourself to suspect was what became routine in ESMA, the Navy Mechanics School that became the headquarters of the business. I talked to Dr. Emilio Mignone, a distinguished physician whose daughter Monica had disappeared into the precincts of that hellish place. What do you find to say to a doctor and a humanitarian who has been gutted by the image of a starving rat being introduced to his daughter's genitalia? Like hell itself the school was endorsed and blessed by priests, in case any stray consciences needed to be stilled. — Christopher Hitchens

Mystical organizations are only a crystallization of facts which can be found, in a more diffuse and less tangible form, in all strata of people. The degree of mystical, sentimental and sadistic feelings corresponds exactly to the degree of the disturbance of natural orgastic experience. Close observation of the audience of a trashy thriller or of a boxing match teaches more about these problems than a hundred handbooks of sexology. — Wilhelm Reich

Satan cannot create anything new, cannot create anything at all. He must steal what God has created. Thus he twists love and God's wonderful gift of sex into lust and sadism and myriad perversions. He disfigures the heart's deep desire to worship God and persuades us to bow before lesser gods of lust or money or power. — Catherine Marshall

This penetrating vocabulary of "initiatory acts," "the infectiousness of the unconflicted person," "priority magic," and so on allows us to understand more subtly the dynamics of group sadism, the utter equanimity with which groups kill. It is not just that "father permits it" or "orders it." It is more: the magical heroic transformation of the world and of oneself. This is the illusion that man craves, as Freud said, and that makes the central person so effective a vehicle for group emotion. — Ernest Becker

Sadism is not an infectious disease that strikes a person all of a sudden. It has a long prehistory in childhood and always originates in the desperate fantasies of a child who is searching for a way out of a hopeless situation. — Alice Miller

As the many male victims of rape in the regime's disgusting jails can testify, this state-run pathology of sexual repression and sexual sadism is not content to degrade women only. — Christopher Hitchens

Sadism is all right in its place, but it should be directed to proper ends. — Sigmund Freud

It's as though not even that most basic level of imaginative thought had been admitted into consciousness to cause the slightest disturbance. A century of destruction unlike any other in its extremity befalls and blights the human race - scores of millions of ordinary people condemned to suffer deprivation upon deprivation, atrocity upon atrocity, evil upon evil, half the world or more subjected to pathological sadism as social policy, whole societies organized and fettered by the fear of violent persecution, the degradation of individual life engineered on a scale unknown throughout human history, nations broken and enslaved by ideological criminals who rob them of everything, entire populations so demoralized as to be unable to get out of bed in the morning with the minutest desire to face the day ... all the terrible touchstones presented by this century, and here they are up in arms about Faunia Farley. — Philip Roth

The children start school now in August. They say it has to do with air-conditioning, but I know sadism when I see it. — Rick Bragg

Baumeister's point is that we have a deep need to understand violence and cruelty through what he calls "the myth of pure evil." Of this myth's many parts, the most important are that evildoers are pure in their evil motives (they have no motives for their actions beyond sadism and greed); victims are pure in their victimhood (they did nothing to bring about their victimization); and evil comes from outside and is associated with a group or force that attacks our group. Furthermore, anyone who questions the application of the myth, who dares muddy the waters of moral certainty, is in league with evil. — Jonathan Haidt

The entire affective world, constructed over the years with utmost difficulty, collapses with a kick in the father's genitals, a smack on the mother's face, an obscene insult to the sister, or the sexual violation of a daughter. Suddenly an entire culture based on familial love, devotion, the capacity for mutual sacrifice collapses. Nothing is possible in such a universe, and that is precisely what the torturers know ... From my cell, I'd hear the whispered voices of children trying to learn what was happening to their parents, and I'd witness the efforts of daughters to win over a guard, to arouse a feeling of tenderness in him, to incite the hope of some lovely future relationship between them in order to learn what was happening to her mother, to get an orange sent to her, to get permission for her to go to the bathroom. — Jacobo Timerman

Now they're really amused, and burst into laughter. Someone tries a variation while still clapping hands: 'Clipped prick ... clipped prick.' Whereupon they begin alternating while clapping their hands: 'Jew ... Clipped prick ... Jew ... Clipped prick.' It seems they're no longer angry, merely having a good time. I keep bouncing in the chair and moaning as the electric shocks penetrate [ ... ] — Jacobo Timerman

If we mean by love the passionate affirmation and active relatedness to the esssence of a particular person, if we mean by it the union with another person on the basis of the independence and integrity of the two persons involved, then masochism and love are opposites. Love is based on equality and freedom. If it is based on subordination and loss of integrity of one partner, it is masochistic dependence regardless of how the relationship is rationalized. Sadism also appears frequently under the disguise of love. To rule over another person, if one can claim that to rule him is for that person's own sake, frequently appears as an expression of love, but the essential factor is the enjoyment of domination. — Erich Fromm

Yet I had not bargained for this, the girl with tears hanging on her cheeks like stuck pearls, her cunt a split fig below the great globes of her buttocks on which the knotted tails of the cat were about to descend, while a man in a black mask fingered with his free hand his prick, that curved upwards like a scimitar he held. The picture had a caption 'Reproof of curiosity. — Angela Carter

When she's abandoned her moral center and teachings ... when she's cast aside her facade of propriety and lady-like demeanor ... when I have so corrupted this fragile thing and brought out a writhing, mewling, bucking, wanton whore for my enjoyment and pleasure ... enticing from within this feral lioness ... growling and scratching and biting ... taking everything I dish out to her ... at that moment she is never more beautiful to me. — Marquis De Sade

Though films become more daring sexually, they are probably less sexy than they ever were. There haven't been any convincing love scenes or romances in the movies in a while. (Nobody even seems to neck in theaters any more.) ... when the mechanics and sadism quotients go up, the movie love interest goes dead, and the film just lies there, giving a certain amount of offense. — Renata Adler

Pedersen was always wooing her. Sometimes he was gracious and kind, but at other times when his failure wearied him he would be cruel and sardonic, with a suggestive tongue whose vice would have scourged her were it not that Marie was impervious, or too deeply inured to mind it. She always grinned at him and fobbed him off with pleasantries, whether he was amorous or acrid.
'God Almighty,' he would groan, 'she is not good for me, this Marie. What can I do for her? She is burning me alive and the Skaggerack could not quench me, not all of it. The devil! What can I do with this? Some day I shall smash her across the eyes, yes, across the eyes.'
So you see the man really loved her.
("The Tiger") — A.E. Coppard

The best hiding place was love. Thus the conversion from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred, to fraudulent love. — Toni Morrison

Pornography reveals that male pleasure is inextricably tied to victimizing, hurting, exploiting; that sexual fun and sexual passion in the privacy of the male imagination are inseparable from the brutality of male history. The private world of sexual dominance that men demand as their right and their freedom is the mirror image of the public world of sadism and atrocity that men consistently and self-righteously deplore. It is in the male experience of pleasure that one finds the meaning of male history. — Andrea Dworkin

You assume we are all sexually stable; while on the other hand, as I have become acquainted with people, I find that they are all perverted sinners, one way or another, that the whole
society is corrupt and rotten and repressed and unconscious that it exhibits its repression in various forms of social sadism. — Allen Ginsberg

Sadistic excess attempts to reach roughly and by harshness what art reaches by fineness. — Wyndham Lewis

The pleasure in complete domination over another person (or other animate creature) is the very essence of the sadistic drive. Another way of formulating the same thought is to say that the aim of sadism is to transform man into a thing, something animate into something inanimate, since by complete and absolute control the living loses one essential quality of life - freedom. — Erich Fromm

It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character. — Joseph Heller

I picked up the Bible and read it from cover to cover one weekend - just as if it were a novel - very rapidly, and I've never gotten over the shock of it. The miracles, the inconsistencies, the improbabilities, the impossibilities, the wretched history, the sordid sex, the sadism in it - the whole thing shocked me profoundly. — Madalyn Murray O'Hair

No, no, don't let my vulnerable heart share in this sacrifice to lust! Let him disgust me before pleasing me! Let him be what others have been, an instrument that I can break before becoming the echoes of its vibration. — Rachilde

It would be nice to think that a censor could allow a genuine work of artistic seriousness and ban a titillating piece of sadism, but it would take a miracle to make such a distinction stick. — Katharine Whitehorn

Fascism has nothing to do with capitalism. Fascism is just a kind of meaningless wickedness, an aberration, 'mass sadism', the sort of thing that would happen if you suddenly let loose an asylumful of homicidal maniacs. — George Orwell

To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle [ ... ] Without cruelty there is no festival. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Hatred can be nurtured anywhere, idealism can be perverted into sadism anywhere. If hatred and sadism combine with modern technology the inferno could erupt anew anywhere. — Simon Wiesenthal

I want my life to be a battle cry, a war zone, an arrow pointed and loosed into the heart of domination: patriarchy, imperialism, industrialization, every system of power and sadism. — Lierre Keith