Canonise ‘business success,’ and men who made a success like that of the Standard Oil Trust become national heroes!
IDA TARBELLThe only reason I am glad I am a woman is because I will not have to marry one.
More Ida Tarbell Quotes
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I have never seen fundamental improvements imposed from the top by ordinances and laws.
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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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One of our gravest mistakes is persuading ourselves that nobody has passed this way before.
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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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a little sounder for those who come after. Nobody begins or ends anything. Each person is a link, weak or strong, in an endless chain.
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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.
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I wanted the people to know the truth about the Standard Oil Company.
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Life is but a collection of habits.
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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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How defeated and restless the child that is not doing something in which it sees a purpose, a meaning! It is by its self-directed activity that the child, as years pass, finds its work, the thing it wants to do and for which it finally is willing to deny itself pleasure, ease, even sleep and comfort.
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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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There is no more effective medicine to apply to feverish public sentiments than figures.
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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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[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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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.
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Cheerful endurance of hardships and contempt of surroundings become a virtue in a pioneer. Comfort is a comparatively new thing in the United States.
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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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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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we were raising our standard of living at the expense of our standard of character.
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A mind which really lays hold of a subject is not easily detached from it.
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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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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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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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The inference is that the men alone render useful service. But neither man nor woman eats these things until the woman has prepared it.
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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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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