A mind which really lays hold of a subject is not easily detached from it.
IDA TARBELLVery 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.
More Ida Tarbell Quotes
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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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One of our gravest mistakes is persuading ourselves that nobody has passed this way before.
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A popular disturbance never remains long in the full control of those who start it.
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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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To denumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals.
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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 only reason I am glad I am a woman is because I will not have to marry one.
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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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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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Many 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.
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I wanted the people to know the truth about the Standard Oil Company.
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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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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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In walking through the world there is a choice for a man to make.
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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. …
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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.
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The athlete who abuses the rules, receives, we shall have gone a long way toward making commerce a fit pursuit for our young men.
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Buy cheap and sell high is a rule of business, and when you control enough money and enough banks you can always manage that a stock you want shall be temporarily cheap.
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The economic advantages of sobriety have never been doubtful.
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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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You cannot settle a new country without suffering, exposure, and danger.
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No value is destroyed for you – only for the original owner.
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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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A more immediate wrong is the way the movement for a fuller, freer life for all human beings is hampered.
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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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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.
IDA TARBELL