The methods it employs with such acumen, persistency, and secrecy are employed by all sorts of business men, from corner grocers up to bankers. If exposed, they are excused on the ground that this is business.
IDA TARBELLVery often people who admit the facts, who are willing to see that Mr. Rockefeller has employed force and fraud to secure his ends, justify him by declaring, ‘It’s business.’ That is, ‘it’s business’ has come to be a legitimate excuse for hard dealing, sly tricks, special privileges.
More Ida Tarbell Quotes
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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.
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To denumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals.
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I came then to a conviction that has never left me: that there is too much for me to attend to in this mortal life without overspeculation on the immortal, that it is not necessary to my peace of mind or to my effort to be a decent and useful person, to have a definite assurance about the affairs of the next world.
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a little sounder for those who come after. Nobody begins or ends anything. Each person is a link, weak or strong, in an endless chain.
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They fought their way to control by rebate and drawback, bribe and blackmail, espionage and price cutting, by ruthless efficiency of organization.
IDA TARBELL -
we were raising our standard of living at the expense of our standard of character.
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A mind which really lays hold of a subject is not easily detached from it.
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It’s always a revolution, you know, when things occur of which you have never happened to hear!
IDA TARBELL -
One of the most depressing features of the ethical side of the matter is that instead of such methods arousing contempt they are more or less openly admired. And this is logical.
IDA TARBELL -
A popular disturbance never remains long in the full control of those who start it.
IDA TARBELL -
In walking through the world there is a choice for a man to make.
IDA TARBELL -
Ripe old age, cheerful, useful, and understanding, is one of the finest influences in the world.
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Sacredness of human life! The world has never believed it! It has been with life that we settled our quarrels, won wives, gold and land, defended ideas, imposed religions.
IDA TARBELL -
When the business man who fights to secure special privileges, to crowd his competitor off the track by other than fair competitive methods, receives the same summary disdainful ostracism by his fellows that the doctor or lawyer who is ‘unprofessional,.
IDA TARBELL -
It is but another of the proofs which are heaping up in American industry to-day that whatever is good for men and women – contributes to their health, happiness, development – is good for business.
IDA TARBELL