“The theory that the man who raises corn does a more important piece of work than the woman who makes it into bread is absurd.”

Canonise ‘business success,’ and men who made a success like that of the Standard Oil Trust become national heroes!

[John D. Rockefeller] didn’t care about anyone he did anything just to be rich and be the only company standing without any competition. He destroyed anyone else.

My final comment is that I still believe this man [John D. Rockefeller] is corrupt and he used unfair ways to become wealthy, all he cared about was his money and wasn’t considered.

We are a commercial people. We cannot boast of our arts, our crafts, our cultivation; our boast is in the wealth we produce.

My whole theory for the improvement of society is based on a belief in the discipline and the education of the individual to self-control and right doing, for the sake of right doing.

In walking through the world there is a choice for a man to make.

No value is destroyed for you – only for the original owner.

Ripe old age, cheerful, useful, and understanding, is one of the finest influences in the world.

One of our gravest mistakes is persuading ourselves that nobody has passed this way before.

Perhaps our national ambition to standardize ourselves has behind it the notion that democracy means standardization. But standardization is the surest way to destroy the initiative.

A popular disturbance never remains long in the full control of those who start it.

A mind which really lays hold of a subject is not easily detached from it.

There is no more effective medicine to apply to feverish public sentiments than figures.

A mind truly cultivated never feels that the intellectual process is complete until it can reproduce in some media the thing which it has absorbed.

It’s always a revolution, you know, when things occur of which you have never happened to hear!

Were it alone in these methods, public scorn would long ago have made short work of the Standard Oil Company. But it is simply the most conspicuous type of what can be done by these practices.

I don’t like the word ironic. I like the word absurdity, and I don’t really understand the word ‘irony’ too much. The irony comes when you try to verbalize the absurd. When irony happens without words, it’s much more exalted.

I like darkness and confusion and absurdity, but I like to know that there could be a little door that you could go out into a safe life area of happiness.

I look at the world and I see absurdity all around me. People do strange things constantly, to the point that, for the most part, we manage not to see it. That’s why I love coffee shops and public places – I mean, they’re all out there.

I had become aware, as early as my college days, that no opinion, however absurd and incredible can be imagined, that has not been held by one of the philosophers.

The idea of only someone else loving you is absurd. You need to learn to love yourself too.

What an absurd notion that women have not intellectual and moral faculties sufficent for anything else but domestic concerns!

Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand – that of finding a workable compromise between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.

To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree