John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Quote

The American Beauty Rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working-out of a law of nature and a law of God.

Address to the students of Brown University, quoted in Ida Tarbell (1904) The History of the Standard Oil Company