The first and most imperative necessity in war is money, for money means everything else — men, guns, ammunition.
IDA TARBELLThere is no gaming table in the world where loaded dice are tolerated, no athletic field where men must not start fair.
More Ida Tarbell Quotes
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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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There is no man more dangerous, in a position of power, than he who refuses to accept as a working truth the idea that all a man does should make for rightness and soundness, that even the fixing of a tariff rate must be moral.
IDA TARBELL -
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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Life is but a collection of habits.
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 not alone that justice is wounded by denying women a part in the making of the civilized world.
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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.
IDA TARBELL -
My final comment is that I still believe this man [John D. Rockefeller] is corrupt and he used unfair ways to become wealthy, all he cared about was his money and wasn’t considered.
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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 -
I wanted the people to know the truth about the Standard Oil Company.
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The surprise of the fight on the long day, of the experiments with the shorter one, has been not only that the business could stand it, but that the business thrived under it as surely as the man did.
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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.
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.
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We have held that a death toll was a necessary part of every human achievement, whether sport, war or industry. A moment’s rage over the horror of it, and we have sunk into indifference.
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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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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.
IDA TARBELL -
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.
IDA TARBELL -
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.
IDA TARBELL -
we were raising our standard of living at the expense of our standard of character.
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 -
A popular disturbance never remains long in the full control of those who start it.
IDA TARBELL -
[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!.
IDA TARBELL -
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.
IDA TARBELL -
The theory that the man who raises corn does a more important piece of work than the woman who makes it into bread is absurd.
IDA TARBELL -
There is no more effective medicine to apply to feverish public sentiments than figures.
IDA TARBELL -
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. …
IDA TARBELL