Robber Barons Quotes

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.

Anti-monopoly is a movement inspired by a set of fools and black-mailers. To be sure, there are some men in it whose motives are good, if their sense is not. When I want to buy up any politician, I always find the Anti-Monopolists the most purchasable. They don't come so high

The industrial revolution was accomplished by a group of financial titans, whose methods were not scrutinized with too much care, and who were honored in proportion as they produced the results, irrespective of the means they used.

People who teach American history survey classes have a lot of ground to cover and tend to focus on landmarks. You get through the Civil War and Reconstruction, and you have to get to the beginning of the 20th century fast. It's pretty easy to go lightly on the Gilded Age.

Late 19th-century America was basically a plutocratic enterprise while people toiled in mines and died of coal dust poisoning.

Reagan's story of freedom superficially alludes to the Founding Fathers, but its substance comes from the Gilded Age, devised by apologists for the robber barons. It is posed abstractly as the freedom of the individual from government control a Jeffersonian ideal at the roots of our Bill of Rights, to be sure. But what it meant in politics a century later, and still means today, is the freedom to accumulate wealth without social or democratic responsibilities and license to buy the political system right out from everyone else.

Capitalism in Russia has spawned far more Al Capones than Henry Fords.

Trump's administration looks a great deal like those of the 1850s and the 1890s, with business and government so intertwined that they cannot be disentangled.

The Gilded Age robber barons - the Goulds, the Vanderbilts, the Morgans and Rockefellers - did quite well under laissez-faire. Most of the rest of Americans were still stuck in the ditch, with little to no economic security, life expectancy of roughly 45 years, and horrific infant mortality rates that claimed 300 babies per 1,000 in the cities.

When it comes to rapacious 19th century capitalism, my family's hands are clean.

The robber barons were a blessing to America. They got filthy rich but they took enormous risks and were entitled to get rich.

The goose that lays the golden egg has been considered a most valuable possession. But even more profitable is the privilege of taking the golden eggs laid by somebody else's goose. The investment bankers and their associates now enjoy that privilege. They control the people through the people's own money.

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.

People like the robber barons assumed that the doctrine of the survival of the fittest authenticated them as deserving power. You know, "I'm the richest. Therefore, I'm the best. God's in his heaven, etc." And that reaction of the robber barons was so irritating to people that it made it unfashionable to think of an economy as an ecosystem. But the truth is that it is a lot like an ecosystem. And you get many of the same results.

Rightfully given near-deity status in the early days of industrial America, the J.P. Morgans, Rockefellers, Carnegies, and Vanderbilts of the world not only ran our country, they were also revered - and often despised - as larger-than-life personalities who could perform feats mere mortals could only dream of.

In the Eisenhower era, when earnings over $400,000 were subject to 91 percent taxes and the world was a smaller place, you could count the truly wealthy on one hand: Getty, Dupont, Mellon, Rockefeller, though even those fortunes were being dispersed to children as the old robber barons died off.

I was taught by professors who had done their schooling in the 1930s. Most of them were scornful of, even hated, big business.

I don't mean to be presumptuous, but I liken myself to the robber barons.

The United States, of course, in the late 19th century was extraordinarily corrupt.

The records of the period show that the outcry against the concentration of capital was furious. Men believed that it threatened society with a form of tyranny more abhorrent than it had ever endured.

My dad was a labour lawyer, and the ideas that I grew up with - bad management, bad capitalism, robber barons - when I applied this to my own life, I saw that we are all on both sides of the coin.

The latter-day robber barons are discovering that better conditions and rewards for workers pay off in a world where consumers increasingly demand ethical standards.

It's a real enigma why people are so averse to real free market capitalism even now. Here we are, in the century that has seen Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Castro, Pol Pot-and we're still being warned against the 'robber barons' of the 19th century. I don't know that Jay Gould or John D. Rockefeller ever killed anyone. The State has killed countless people, and yet we're always supposed to remain on guard against these 'greedy villains' of yesteryear.

Robber Barons