“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.”

There is no more effective medicine to apply to feverish public sentiments than figures.

A mind truly cultivated never feels that the intellectual process is complete until it can reproduce in some media the thing which it has absorbed.

It’s always a revolution, you know, when things occur of which you have never happened to hear!

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.

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.

The only reason I am glad I am a woman is because I will not have to marry one.

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.

To give a price to an artwork, no matter how high or low, is always absurd. It’s not something that can be measured by money or by certain numbers.

When I was a kid, I read comics. But when I saw how funny it was, and how wonderfully absurd, I said, “You know, I gotta do this.”

The best mannered people make the most absurd lovers.

Now it would be as absurd to deny the existence of God, because we cannot see him, as it would be to deny the existence of the air or wind, because we cannot see it.

We must keep our freedom of mind, and must believe that in nature what is absurd, according to our theories, is not always impossible.

A greater absurdity cannot be thought of than a morose, hardhearted, covetous, proud, malicious Christian.

I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.

Absurdity is what I like most in life.