Tao Te Ching

The Power of Goodness, the Wisdom Beyond Words
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Ida Tarbell

1857 – 1944 CE

Journalist, author, teacher, and leading authority on Abraham Lincoln; Ida Tarbell invented a new kind of reporting now called investigative journalism. She developed new techniques like researching public documents scattered across the country and then, based on this research, interviewing executives, academics experts, and government regulators. With a little help from Mark Twain, she applied these new methods to an exposé on the Standard Oil Company and John D. Rockefeller who she described as viciously money-grabbing, miserly, and harming the country with his monopolizing of oil. This ushered in what’s now called the “the era of muckraking journalism,” brought down one of the world's worst tycoons, broke up the Standard Oil monopoly, and inspired a play with 686 continuous performances setting the record for any New York play.

Eras

Quotes by Ida Tarbell (5 quotes)

“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 de-numb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals.”

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“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 sink into indifference.”

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

Themes: Imagination

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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.”

Themes: Capitalism

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“Our present law-makers, as a body, are ignorant, corrupt and unprincipled; the majority of them are, directly or indirectly, under the control of the very monopolies against whose acts we have been seeking relief.”

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