Canonise ‘business success,’ and men who made a success like that of the Standard Oil Trust become national heroes!
IDA TARBELLwe were raising our standard of living at the expense of our standard of character.
More Ida Tarbell Quotes
-
-
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 -
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,.
IDA TARBELL -
Such fluctuations were the natural element of the speculator, and he came early, buying in quantities and holding in storage tanks for higher prices.
IDA TARBELL -
I have never seen fundamental improvements imposed from the top by ordinances and laws.
IDA TARBELL -
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.
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 -
We are a commercial people. We cannot boast of our arts, our crafts, our cultivation; our boast is in the wealth we produce.
IDA TARBELL -
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.
IDA TARBELL -
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.
IDA TARBELL -
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 -
Rockefeller and his associates did not build the Standard Oil Co. in the board rooms of Wall Street banks.
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 -
The athlete who abuses the rules, receives, we shall have gone a long way toward making commerce a fit pursuit for our young men.
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 -
To denumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals.
IDA TARBELL