Canonise ‘business success,’ and men who made a success like that of the Standard Oil Trust become national heroes!
IDA TARBELLThey fought their way to control by rebate and drawback, bribe and blackmail, espionage and price cutting, by ruthless efficiency of organization.
More Ida Tarbell Quotes
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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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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.
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One of the permanent possessions of the human heart is the memory of its noble enthusiasms.
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Ripe old age, cheerful, useful, and understanding, is one of the finest influences in the world.
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we were raising our standard of living at the expense of our standard of character.
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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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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.
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Imagination is the only key to the future. Without it none exists – with it all things are possible.
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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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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.
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A mind which really lays hold of a subject is not easily detached from it.
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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 economic advantages of sobriety have never been doubtful.
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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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Rockefeller and his associates did not build the Standard Oil Co. in the board rooms of Wall Street banks.
IDA TARBELL






