Ida Tarbell Quotes

34 Sourced Quotes

A mind which really lays hold of a subject is not easily detached from it.

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

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
Standardization is the surest way to destroy the initiative, to benumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals.

Ida Tarbell
The economic advantages of sobriety have never been doubtful.

Ida Tarbell
You cannot settle a new country without suffering, exposure, and danger. 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
One of the most depressing features of the ethical side of the matter is that instead of such methods arousing contempt they are more or less openly admired. And this is logical. Canonise 'business success,' and men who made a success like that of the Standard Oil Trust become national heroes!

Ida Tarbell
Ripe old age, cheerful, useful, and understanding, is one of the finest influences in the world.

Ida Tarbell
The only reason I am glad I am a woman is because I will not have to marry one.

Ida Tarbell
Very often people who admit the facts, who are willing to see that Mr. Rockefeller has employed force and fraud to secure his ends, justify him by declaring, 'It's business.' That is, 'it's business' has come to be a legitimate excuse for hard dealing, sly tricks, special privileges.

Ida Tarbell
Those long rides, these night waits, brought unforgettable looks into human lives. Strange how travelers will confide their ambitions, unload their secrets, show their scars to strangers.

Ida Tarbell
There is no more effective medicine to apply to feverish public sentiment than figures.

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
She was one of those who always see spring in a single sparrow.

Ida Tarbell
Rockefeller and his associates did not build the Standard Oil Co. in the board rooms of Wall Street banks. They fought their way to control by rebate and drawback, bribe and blackmail, espionage and price cutting, by ruthless efficiency of organization.

Ida Tarbell
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.

Ida Tarbell
When the business man who fights to secure special privileges, to crowd his competitor off the track by other than fair competitive methods, receives the same summary disdainful ostracism by his fellows that the doctor or lawyer who is 'unprofessional,' 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
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. 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.

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

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
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.

Ida Tarbell
Buy cheap and sell high is a rule of business, and when you control enough money and enough banks you can always manage that a stock you want shall be temporarily cheap. No value is destroyed for you — only for the original owner.

Ida Tarbell
It's always a revolution, you know, when things occur of which you have never happened to hear!

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

Ida Tarbell
There is no gaming table in the world where loaded dice are tolerated, no athletic field where men must not start fair. 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
Sacredness of human life! The world has never believed it! It has been with life that we settled our quarrels, won wives, gold and land, defended ideas, imposed religions. 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
My 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. I have never seen fundamental improvements imposed from the top by ordinances and laws.

Ida Tarbell
We were raising our standard of living at the expense of our standard of character.

Ida Tarbell
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.

Ida Tarbell
A popular disturbance never remains long in the full control of those who start it.

Ida Tarbell