“[On dishonest business methods:] … frequently the defender of the practice falls back on the Christian doctrine of charity, and points out that we are erring mortals and must allow for each other’s weaknesses!.”

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.

Imagination is the only key to the future. Without it none exists – with it all things are possible.

As a consequence business success is sanctified, and, practically, any methods which achieve it are justified by a larger and larger class.

The economic advantages of sobriety have never been doubtful.

Many men ridicule the idea that it can be scientifically handled. They tell us the unemployed have always been with us, and always must be. It is the oldest reason in the world for tolerating injustice and misery.

One of the permanent possessions of the human heart is the memory of its noble enthusiasms.

The first and most imperative necessity in war is money, for money means everything else — men, guns, ammunition.

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.

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.

ISIS says they want to go back and reject modernity? Well, I think we should help them. We ought to bomb them back to the Stone Age.

I remember being about six years old, for the first day of school, and sitting in the back of a Chrysler, pretending to cry while listening to Tracy Chapman.

When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.

I look forward and see myself look back.

Looking back, I now see so many similarities between my own childhood and that of my sons. My father stepped in when I needed him, and that gave me the chance for a better life. That’s what I’m doing for my boys now.

For me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law.

I don’t get tired. I get beat up. You keep chopping on a tree, you need to give the tree some rest so the chlorophyll will fill back up and the tree gets its energy back.

When I went off to college in 1997, I didn’t go back and watch ‘Conan.’ I was out partying and dating women.