Selected Ida Tarbell Quotations

Ida Tarbell

Ida Tarbell was an American journalist born on November 5, 1857, in Erie County, Pennsylvania. She was the only woman in her graduating class at Allegheny College in 1880. The McClure’smagazine journalist was an investigative reporting pioneer; Tarbell exposed unfair practices of the Standard Oil Company, leading to a U.S. Supreme Court decision to break its monopoly. She died January 6, 1944.

Journalist, writer, social reformer. Born on November 5, 1857, in Erie County, Pennsylvania. Known largely for her articles against big business, Ida Tarbell excelled as a journalist at a time when few women were in this field. She graduated from Allegheny College in 1880—the only woman in her class. After spending a short time teaching, Tarbell joined the staff of The Chautauquan, a monthly magazine, in 1883.

From 1891 to 1894, Ida Tarbell studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and worked as a freelance writer. Joining McClure's, a popular magazine, as an editor in 1894, she started out by writing biographies. Tarbell later began her best-known project—an examination of the Standard Oil Company. She was familiar with the oil business; her father had been an oilman. Showing great determination, Tarbell dug into the Rockefellers' family oil monopoly and uncovered their unfair business practices. Her discoveries were first published in the magazine and later were published as the bookThe History of the Standard Oil Company (1904). Her work contributed to the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to break up the Standard Oil monopoly in 1911.

One of the greatest journalists of the twentieth century, Ida Tarbell was a pioneer in investigative reporting. She died on January 6, 1944. In 2000, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. Two years later, Tarbell was honored by having her likeness appear on a U.S. postage stamp as part of the Women in Journalism stamp series, along with Nellie Bly, Marguerite Higgins, and Ethel Payne.

Selected Ida Tarbell Quotations

• 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.

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

• 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.

• (about John D. Rockefeller)And he calls his great organization a benefaction, and points to his church-going and charities as proof of his righteousness. This is supreme wrong-doing cloaked by religion. There is but one name for it -- hypocrisy.

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

• 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.

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

• Perhaps our national ambition to standardize ourselves has behind it the notion that democracy means standardization. But 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.

• The first and most imperative necessity in war is money, for money means everything else -- men, guns, ammunition.

• 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.

• 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....