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. …
IDA TARBELLIn walking through the world there is a choice for a man to make.
More Ida Tarbell Quotes
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It’s always a revolution, you know, when things occur of which you have never happened to hear!
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Canonise ‘business success,’ and men who made a success like that of the Standard Oil Trust become national heroes!
IDA TARBELL -
There is no more effective medicine to apply to feverish public sentiments than figures.
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One of our gravest mistakes is persuading ourselves that nobody has passed this way before.
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Imagination is the only key to the future. Without it none exists – with it all things are possible.
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I have never seen fundamental improvements imposed from the top by ordinances and laws.
IDA TARBELL -
Cheerful endurance of hardships and contempt of surroundings become a virtue in a pioneer. Comfort is a comparatively new thing in the United States.
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There is no gaming table in the world where loaded dice are tolerated, no athletic field where men must not start fair.
IDA TARBELL -
To denumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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,.
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He can choose the fair and open path, the path which sound ethics, sound democracy, and the common law prescribe, or choose the secret way by which he can get the better of his fellow man.
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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.
IDA TARBELL






