Quotes About Business

In other words, the Sherman Antitrust Act wouldn't be used against U.S. Steel.

Has anyone given you the law of these offices? No? It is this: nobody does anything if he can get anybody else to do it.… As soon as you can, get some one whom you can rely on, train him in the work, sit down, cock up your heels, and think out some way for the Standard Oil to make some money.

when John Rockefeller dies," Archbold said, "the world is going to be surprised to learn what a very great man he has been in every way.

Like the London merchant bankers, the early Jewish bankers on Wall Street had started out as dry-goods merchants: the Lehmans began as Alabama cotton brokers; Goldman, as the owner of a Pennsylvania clothing store, Kuhn and Loeb, as Cincinnati clothiers; and Lazard, in a New Orleans dry-goods business.

Yet Gates was groomed by Rockefeller, and if he was granted a large measure of freedom, it was partly because Rockefeller had trained him as his proxy.

He believed in Standard Oil and gladly purchased all available stock from other directors.

grooming sons to inherit their respective businesses.

Between February 17 and March 28, 1872—between the first rumors of the SIC and the time it was scuttled—Rockefeller swallowed up twenty-two of his twenty-six Cleveland competitors. During

Beyond the size of his stake, Rockefeller also possessed an unlikely charisma

Gates himself invested in several of the companies he managed for Rockefeller, and in 1902 he cashed in a tidy $500,000 profit.

but Rockefeller started at the top, believing that if he could crack his strongest competitor first, it would have a tremendous psychological impact.

To purify himself of all business ties, Junior also retired at the same time from U.S. Steel.

Rockefeller could brush off Tarbell's critique of his business methods as biased, but he was deeply pained by the character study.

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

Every company that failed and was reorganized by a bank ended up the bank's captive client.

Rockefeller knew that he was overpaying but couldn't resist a deal that would certify his position as the world's largest oil refiner at age thirty-one.

James Clark later told Ida Tarbell that he sold out only from fear of the SIC contract.

Rockefeller also favored Archbold because he was wedded to Standard Oil business, whereas Rogers was often distracted by other interests.

You see, this scheme is bound to work. It means an absolute control by us of the oil business.

By instinct, by blind faith, by knowledge of his father's private character—by everything but detailed knowledge of his business career

As at Standard Oil, Rockefeller insisted upon keeping a cash balance that never dipped below $10 million.

who warned Roosevelt not to antagonize the Morgan interests without any proof of major wrongdoing.

Rockefeller was a forgiving lender and, by all accounts, lenient to a fault.

In a footnote, Lawson further conceded that Rockefeller never put a dime into the Amalgamated flotation.