I behold your race, like starving mariners on a raft, plucking crusts out of the hands of famine and feeding on each other's lives.

I follow sins beyond the moment of their acting; I find in all that the last consequence is death; and to my eyes, the pretty maid who thwarts her mother with such taking graces on a question of a ball, drips no less visibly with human gore than such a murderer as yourself.

Do I say that I follow sins?
I follow virtues also; they differ not by the thickness of a nail, they are both scythes for the reaping angel of Death.

Evil, for which I live, consists not in action but in character.

The bad man is dear to me; not the bad act, whose fruits, if we could follow them far enough down the hurtling cataract of the ages, might yet be found more blessed than those of the rarest virtues.