Sacredness of human life! The world has never believed it! It has been with life that we settled our quarrels, won wives, gold and land, defended ideas, imposed religions.
IDA TARBELLMany 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.
More Ida Tarbell Quotes
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Now, if the Standard Oil Company were the only concern in the country guilty of the practices which have given it monopolistic power this story never would have been written.
IDA TARBELL -
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 -
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 wanted the people to know the truth about the Standard Oil Company.
IDA TARBELL -
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.
IDA TARBELL -
Canonise ‘business success,’ and men who made a success like that of the Standard Oil Trust become national heroes!
IDA TARBELL -
You cannot settle a new country without suffering, exposure, and danger.
IDA TARBELL -
An excuse which, if carried to its legitimate conclusion, would leave our business men weeping on one another’s shoulders over human frailty, while they picked one another’s pockets.
IDA TARBELL -
One of our gravest mistakes is persuading ourselves that nobody has passed this way before.
IDA TARBELL -
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.
IDA TARBELL -
Rockefeller and his associates did not build the Standard Oil Co. in the board rooms of Wall Street banks.
IDA TARBELL -
The first and most imperative necessity in war is money, for money means everything else — men, guns, ammunition.
IDA TARBELL -
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.
IDA TARBELL -
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.
IDA TARBELL -
My whole theory for the improvement of society is based on a belief in the discipline and the education of the individual to self-control and right doing, for the sake of right doing.
IDA TARBELL