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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

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Ida Tarbell
Age: 86 †
Born: 1857
Born: November 5
Died: 1944
Died: January 6
Author
Biographer
Historian
Investigative Reporter
Journalist
Writer
Erie County
Pennsylvania
Ida Minerva Tarbell
Ida M. Tarbell
Rooms
Price
Associates
Control
Street
Banks
Drawback
Way
Standards
Efficiency
Rockefeller
Organization
Board
Blackmail
Build
Boards
Drawbacks
Cutting
Fought
Espionage
Streets
Oil
Bribe
Wall
Standard
Ruthless

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There is no more effective medicine to apply to feverish public sentiments than figures.
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A popular disturbance never remains long in the full control of those who start it.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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My final comment is that I still believe this man [John D. Rockefeller] is corrupt and he used unfair ways to become wealthy, all he cared about was his money and wasn't considered.
Ida Tarbell
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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.
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The first and most imperative necessity in war is money, for money means everything else -- men, guns, ammunition.
Ida Tarbell
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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
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... the economic advantages of sobriety have never been doubtful.
Ida Tarbell
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we were raising our standard of living at the expense of our standard of character.
Ida Tarbell
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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
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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
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Imagination is the only key to the future. Without it none exists - with it all things are possible.
Ida Tarbell
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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.
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I decided to write the book to open the eyes of the people of how corrupt John D. Rockefeller company was and the unfair ways he used to be successful. I wanted the people to know the truth about the Standard Oil Company.
Ida Tarbell