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 TARBELLMy whole theory for the improvement of society is based on a belief in the discipline and the education of the individual to self-control and right doing, for the sake of right doing.
More Ida Tarbell Quotes
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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 -
[John D. Rockefeller] didn’t care about anyone he did anything just to be rich and be the only company standing without any competition. He destroyed anyone else.
IDA TARBELL -
Rockefeller and his associates did not build the Standard Oil Co. in the board rooms of Wall Street banks.
IDA TARBELL -
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.
IDA TARBELL -
Life is but a collection of habits.
IDA TARBELL -
A mind which really lays hold of a subject is not easily detached from it.
IDA TARBELL -
One of the permanent possessions of the human heart is the memory of its noble enthusiasms.
IDA TARBELL -
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.
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 -
[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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
As a consequence business success is sanctified, and, practically, any methods which achieve it are justified by a larger and larger class.
IDA TARBELL