"Yielding to a temptation is like yielding to a blackmailer; you pay to be free, and find yourself the more enslaved."

The evil of vindictiveness is the same as that of every other sin; it is that in some extraordinary way it tends to destroy the soul, to blacken and eat up the whole nature [...] Yielding to a temptation is like yielding to a blackmailer; you pay to be free, and find yourself the more enslaved. The reality of sin arises, in fact, from the same truth which makes the reality of human poetry and joy. It arises from the fact that the smallest thing in this world has its own infinity [...]

[...] That is the whole point of the position of sin in human psychology, and that is the whole point of the peril of revenge. Hatred is bad [...] because it narrows the soul to a sharp point. It is not merely that Jones desires the death of Brown [...] The evil is that the death of Brown becomes the whole life of Jones. The violent man, in short, tries to break out; but he only succeeds in breaking in. He breaks into smaller and smaller cells of his own subterranean heart till he is suffocated in the smallest, and dies like a rat in a hole.

-August 8, 1908, Daily News