To denumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals.
IDA TARBELLThe inference is that the men alone render useful service. But neither man nor woman eats these things until the woman has prepared it.
More Ida Tarbell Quotes
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I wanted the people to know the truth about the Standard Oil Company.
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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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They fought their way to control by rebate and drawback, bribe and blackmail, espionage and price cutting, by ruthless efficiency of organization.
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A mind which really lays hold of a subject is not easily detached from it.
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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.
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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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You cannot settle a new country without suffering, exposure, and danger.
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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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[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!.
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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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I have never seen fundamental improvements imposed from the top by ordinances and laws.
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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.
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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 quest of the truth had been born in me – the most tragic and incomplete, as well as the most essential, of man’s quests.
IDA TARBELL






