Quotes About Legacy

grooming sons to inherit their respective businesses.

That his father honored his wish to leave Standard Oil only deepened the bond between them.

Mr. Rockefeller may have made himself the richest man in the world, but he has paid.

In time, it would become hard to disentangle the House of Morgan from various aspects of Anglo-American policy.

At the January 11, 1910, board meeting, he quietly retired as a director of Standard Oil:

Then it grew steadily clearer that Junior would be the receptacle for the bulk of the fortune.

We know that Archbold had studied corruption at the master's feet, but Senior made no effort to disabuse his son.

Perhaps he did not think Junior could live with the moral ambiguities of a fortune extracted by dubious methods.

My greatest fortune in life has been my son.

Senior must have feared that the stupendous weight of the fortune would crush his delicate son.

Junior would have inherited both the controversy and the legal liability that went with the stock.

John Adams said that if Washington "was not the greatest president, he was the best actor of the presidency we have ever had.

Although Rockefeller never said so outright, one senses that he thought Flagler had become a slave to fashion and ostentation, a traitor to the austere puritanical creed that had united them.

Understandably, the Rockefellers did not wish to broadcast their misfortunes to the world.

Thanks to this staggering appreciation, Rockefeller's net worth reached a lifetime peak of $900 million in 1913—more than $13 billion in 1996 dollars.

Lawrence would function as both a peer and a parental figure for his half brother, and his youthful adventures operated so powerfully on George's imagination that the latter's early life seems to enact a script first drafted by his older brother.

His gifts also reflected his own obsessive concern with longevity.

Washington had become so accustomed to slavery that the bizarre began to seem normal.

It was certainly not their intention, but the trustbusters helped to preserve Rockefeller's legacy for posterity and unquestionably made him the world's richest man.

After Pierpont Morgan's death, the House of Morgan would become less autocratic, less identified with a single individual. Power would be diffused among several partners, although Jack Morgan would remain as figurehead.

At noon on December 14, 1780, Alexander Hamilton, twenty-five, wed Elizabeth Schuyler, twenty-three, in the southeast parlor of the Schuyler mansion.

Each year, Rockefeller reluctantly gave another million dollars to bolster the permanent endowment to keep pace with his free-spending president

Big Bill's interest in medicine, conventional and otherwise, began to surface in his son and became more pronounced with time.

Following his father's example, he recorded every expense in his little book