“If enough oil was held, or if the production fell off, up went the price, only to be knocked down by the throwing of great quantities of stocks on the market.”

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,.

You cannot settle a new country without suffering, exposure, and danger.

we were raising our standard of living at the expense of our standard of character.

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.

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.

Speculation in oil stock companies was another great evil … From the first, oil men had to contend with wild fluctuations in the price of oil. …

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.

They fought their way to control by rebate and drawback, bribe and blackmail, espionage and price cutting, by ruthless efficiency of organization.

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.

An excuse which, if carried to its legitimate conclusion, would leave our business men weeping on one another’s shoulders over human frailty, while they picked one another’s pockets.

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.

Life is but a collection of habits.

The quest of the truth had been born in me – the most tragic and incomplete, as well as the most essential, of man’s quests.

It is not alone that justice is wounded by denying women a part in the making of the civilized world.

A more immediate wrong is the way the movement for a fuller, freer life for all human beings is hampered.

The athlete who abuses the rules, receives, we shall have gone a long way toward making commerce a fit pursuit for our young men.