“Canonise ‘business success,’ and men who made a success like that of the Standard Oil Trust become national heroes!”

They fought their way to control by rebate and drawback, bribe and blackmail, espionage and price cutting, by ruthless efficiency of organization.

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.

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.

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.

Life is but a collection of habits.

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.

It is not alone that justice is wounded by denying women a part in the making of the civilized world.

A more immediate wrong is the way the movement for a fuller, freer life for all human beings is hampered.

The athlete who abuses the rules, receives, we shall have gone a long way toward making commerce a fit pursuit for our young men.

Imagination is the only key to the future. Without it none exists – with it all things are possible.

As a consequence business success is sanctified, and, practically, any methods which achieve it are justified by a larger and larger class.

The economic advantages of sobriety have never been doubtful.

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.

One of the permanent possessions of the human heart is the memory of its noble enthusiasms.

The first and most imperative necessity in war is money, for money means everything else — men, guns, ammunition.

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.

Yeah, I became a successful entrepreneur… Eventually

We became the songs we wrote.

My mother never really thought I could become anything.

We become strong, I feel, when we have no friends upon whom to lean, or to look to for moral guidance.

Just because you came here in 1880, 1950, whenever, you became an American. You get to celebrate July 4th like every other American.

God became someone we could hurt. Why? To get us back… No other religion-whethe r secularism, Greco-Roman paganism, Eastern religion, Judaism, or Islam-believes God became breakable or suffered or had a body.

Christ did not suffer so you wouldn’t suffer. He suffered so when you suffer you will become like Him.

The reasoning man who scorns the prejudices of simpletons necessarily becomes the enemy of simpletons; he must expect as much, and laugh at the inevitable.