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 TARBELLA popular disturbance never remains long in the full control of those who start it.
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.
IDA TARBELL -
One of our gravest mistakes is persuading ourselves that nobody has passed this way before.
IDA TARBELL -
It’s always a revolution, you know, when things occur of which you have never happened to hear!
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 -
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.
IDA TARBELL -
Cheerful endurance of hardships and contempt of surroundings become a virtue in a pioneer. Comfort is a comparatively new thing in the United States.
IDA TARBELL -
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 -
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 -
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.
IDA TARBELL -
To denumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals.
IDA TARBELL -
There is no gaming table in the world where loaded dice are tolerated, no athletic field where men must not start fair.
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.
IDA TARBELL -
Imagination is the only key to the future. Without it none exists – with it all things are possible.
IDA TARBELL -
I decided to write the book to open the eyes of the people of how corrupt John D. Rockefeller company was and the unfair ways he used to be successful.
IDA TARBELL -
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.
IDA TARBELL






