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 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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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.
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As a consequence business success is sanctified, and, practically, any methods which achieve it are justified by a larger and larger class.
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In walking through the world there is a choice for a man to make.
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The economic advantages of sobriety have never been doubtful.
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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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It is not alone that justice is wounded by denying women a part in the making of the civilized world.
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A more immediate wrong is the way the movement for a fuller, freer life for all human beings is hampered.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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Such fluctuations were the natural element of the speculator, and he came early, buying in quantities and holding in storage tanks for higher prices.
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Rockefeller and his associates did not build the Standard Oil Co. in the board rooms of Wall Street banks.
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A mind which really lays hold of a subject is not easily detached from it.
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The only reason I am glad I am a woman is because I will not have to marry one.
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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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We have held that a death toll was a necessary part of every human achievement, whether sport, war or industry. A moment’s rage over the horror of it, and we have sunk into indifference.
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There is no more effective medicine to apply to feverish public sentiments than figures.
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How defeated and restless the child that is not doing something in which it sees a purpose, a meaning! It is by its self-directed activity that the child, as years pass, finds its work, the thing it wants to do and for which it finally is willing to deny itself pleasure, ease, even sleep and comfort.
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a little sounder for those who come after. Nobody begins or ends anything. Each person is a link, weak or strong, in an endless chain.
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They fought their way to control by rebate and drawback, bribe and blackmail, espionage and price cutting, by ruthless efficiency of organization.
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One of the permanent possessions of the human heart is the memory of its noble enthusiasms.
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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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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