[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 TARBELLWe are a commercial people. We cannot boast of our arts, our crafts, our cultivation; our boast is in the wealth we produce.
More Ida Tarbell Quotes
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Canonise ‘business success,’ and men who made a success like that of the Standard Oil Trust become national heroes!
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 -
I wanted the people to know the truth about the Standard Oil Company.
IDA TARBELL -
The athlete who abuses the rules, receives, we shall have gone a long way toward making commerce a fit pursuit for our young men.
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 -
The first and most imperative necessity in war is money, for money means everything else — men, guns, ammunition.
IDA TARBELL -
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.
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 -
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.
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 -
I have never seen fundamental improvements imposed from the top by ordinances and laws.
IDA TARBELL -
We are a commercial people. We cannot boast of our arts, our crafts, our cultivation; our boast is in the wealth we produce.
IDA TARBELL -
Rockefeller and his associates did not build the Standard Oil Co. in the board rooms of Wall Street banks.
IDA TARBELL -
One of our gravest mistakes is persuading ourselves that nobody has passed this way before.
IDA TARBELL -
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