Ida Tarbell Quotes

John D. Rockefeller is the greatest murderer the nation had ever produced.

When companies get together secretly to fix prices and attempt to eliminate competition, honest businessmen suffer. I think this is wrong.

We as Americans assume that big companies are bad, and big power companies are even worse.

But thanks to my invention, my capitalist friends and I were able to bring the government to its knees.

The whole industry is so screwed up by economics. It's disgusting to me.

Capitalism is not about free competitive choices among people who are reasonably equal in their buying and selling of economic power, it is about concentrating capital, concentrating economic power in very few hands using that power to trash everyone who gets in their way.

I think shareholders are the great evil of this modern world.

Capitalism will kill competition.

They [Standard Oil] had never played fair, and that ruined their greatness for me … the open disregard of decent ethical business practices by capitalists.

Hirelings of monopoly

One can be in business and pursue bad profit. That is, by practicing cronyism—rigging the system to undermine competition, innovation and opportunity, making others worse off. Good profit should lead you to improve your ability to help others improve their lives. But that’s not how many businesses act today.

As murderous industrial magnates go, Alfred Nobel is right up there with Ray Kroc, franchiser of McDonald's.

In the time of the robber barons, my great grandfather insisted on reinvesting and sharing profits with workers... He was told he was a socialist, that he was not welcome on Wall Street.

You're not supposed to go into business with the sole purpose of putting your neighbor out of business. This is not the United States of Corporate America.

I have very mixed feelings about big corporations. Oftentimes, they're more troublesome than not.

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. Were it alone in these methods, public scorn would long ago have made short work of the Standard Oil Company. But it is simply the most conspicuous type of what can be done by these practices. 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.

Corporate greed is killing America, and that's what we battling at Boeing.

The time has come when the Executive branch of this Government must enforce the plain letter of the law and check monopoly, or it must turn the people over boldly into the hands of exploiters grown impudent and ruthlessly aggressive through long years of wanton violation of the law.

The executive [President] could have saved the people from the appalling conditions which confront us today, if all the power of this government had been put forth to enforce the [Sherman] Anti-Trust law.

Corporate executives are not all that conservative….They are not interested in the social issues and the big boys and girls are not interested in fighting regulation because that’s what keeps the little boys and girls from becoming big boys and girls.

Out of this modern civilization, economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital - all undreamed of by the Fathers - the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.

I do not allow hirelings of Standard Oil to define my democracy.

We’d be crazy to let corporations get anywhere near our government. The only reason they want to influence government is to plunder—to steal from children.

Business – the world's work – is the sale of lies: Not goods, but trade-marks; and still more and more In every branch becomes the sale of money.

Oppressive and intolerable as was the regime of the great consolidations of capital, even its victims, while they cursed it, were forced to admit the prodigious increase of efficiency which had been imparted to the national industries, the vast economies effected by concentration of management and unity of organization