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.
IDA TARBELLIt 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.
More Ida Tarbell Quotes
-
-
Life is but a collection of habits.
IDA TARBELL -
As a consequence business success is sanctified, and, practically, any methods which achieve it are justified by a larger and larger class.
IDA TARBELL -
The athlete who abuses the rules, receives, we shall have gone a long way toward making commerce a fit pursuit for our young men.
IDA TARBELL -
I decided to write the book to open the eyes of the people of how corrupt John D. Rockefeller company was and the unfair ways he used to be successful.
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 -
A mind which really lays hold of a subject is not easily detached from it.
IDA TARBELL -
To denumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals.
IDA TARBELL -
There is no man more dangerous, in a position of power, than he who refuses to accept as a working truth the idea that all a man does should make for rightness and soundness, that even the fixing of a tariff rate must be moral.
IDA TARBELL -
Now, if the Standard Oil Company were the only concern in the country guilty of the practices which have given it monopolistic power this story never would have been written.
IDA TARBELL -
They fought their way to control by rebate and drawback, bribe and blackmail, espionage and price cutting, by ruthless efficiency of organization.
IDA TARBELL -
Very 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.
IDA TARBELL -
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.
IDA TARBELL -
Yet Mr. Rockefeller has systematically played with loaded dice, and it is doubtful if there has ever been a time since 1872 when he has run a race with a competitor and started fair.
IDA TARBELL -
The economic advantages of sobriety have never been doubtful.
IDA TARBELL -
We are a commercial people. We cannot boast of our arts, our crafts, our cultivation; our boast is in the wealth we produce.
IDA TARBELL






