There is no more effective medicine to apply to feverish public sentiments than figures.
IDA TARBELLTo denumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals.
More Ida Tarbell Quotes
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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.
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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.
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[John D. Rockefeller] didn’t care about anyone he did anything just to be rich and be the only company standing without any competition. He destroyed anyone else.
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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.
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A mind which really lays hold of a subject is not easily detached from it.
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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.
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[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!.
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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.
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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.
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We are a commercial people. We cannot boast of our arts, our crafts, our cultivation; our boast is in the wealth we produce.
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Ripe old age, cheerful, useful, and understanding, is one of the finest influences in the world.
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To denumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals.
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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.
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The first and most imperative necessity in war is money, for money means everything else — men, guns, ammunition.
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Were it alone in these methods, public scorn would long ago have made short work of the Standard Oil Company. But it is simply the most conspicuous type of what can be done by these practices.
IDA TARBELL