Ovid
Poet
"Pleasure is sweetest when 'tis paid for by another's pain."
Sadism quotes
Sadism
18 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Woody Allen
Director, Actor, Writer
"I'd call him a sadistic, hippophilic necrophile, but that would be beating a dead horse."
Emile M. Cioran
Philosopher, Essayist
"Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls."
Sigmund Freud
Neurologist, Psychoanalyst
"Sadism is all right in its place, but it should be directed to proper ends."
Allen Ginsberg
Poet, Activist
"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."
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside sadism — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Sadism quotes
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"Sadistic excess attempts to reach roughly and by harshness what art reaches by fineness."
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"When blended with sexuality, the death instinct is transformed into more harmless impulses expressed in sadism or masochism."
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"Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism."
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"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."
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