“The surprise of the fight on the long day, of the experiments with the shorter one, has been not only that the business could stand it, but that the business thrived under it as surely as the man did.”

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.

The whole force of the respectable circles to which I belonged, that respectable circle which knew as I did not the value of security won, the slender chance of replacing it if lost or abandoned, was against me.

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.

Cheerful endurance of hardships and contempt of surroundings become a virtue in a pioneer. Comfort is a comparatively new thing in the United States.

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.

I have never had illusions about the value of my individual contribution! I realized early that what a man or a woman does is built on what those who have gone before have done, that its real value depends on making the matter in hand a little clearer.

There is no gaming table in the world where loaded dice are tolerated, no athletic field where men must not start fair.

Such fluctuations were the natural element of the speculator, and he came early, buying in quantities and holding in storage tanks for higher prices.

[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!.

The inference is that the men alone render useful service. But neither man nor woman eats these things until the woman has prepared it.

Buy cheap and sell high is a rule of business, and when you control enough money and enough banks you can always manage that a stock you want shall be temporarily cheap.

I wanted the people to know the truth about the Standard Oil Company.

Rockefeller and his associates did not build the Standard Oil Co. in the board rooms of Wall Street banks.

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.

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.

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.

I started the Pies Descalzos foundation in Colombia when I was 18, and since then I have been very involved in the crusade for education.

Why did you do all this for me?’ he asked. ‘I don’t deserve it. I’ve never done anything for you.’ ‘You have been my friend,’ replied Charlotte. ‘That in itself is a tremendous thing.

You’ve done nothing, been nowhere. How do you have the faintest idea what kind of person you are?”

Come what may, I have been blest.

What should I have known or written had I been a quiet, mercantile politician or a lord in waiting? A man must travel, and turmoil, or there is no existence.

I’ve always been interested in jobs in the NBA. But I’ve been in this for 20 years and it might be time to do something else.

As I travel through my country, people often ask me how it feels to have been imprisoned in my home -first for six years, then for 19 months.

One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.