The deluge of monopolistic trusts which had followed the close of the Spanish-American War and the "return of prosperity" was disturbing and confusin… - Ida Tarbell

If I find little satisfaction or hope in examining and comparing one by one my four successive generations, I find considerable in looking at them as a whole. When I do that, I see not a group of cycles rolling one after another along a rocky and uneven road but a spiral-the group moves upward. To be sure it is not a very steady spiral, but I am convinced that is the real movement. Could there be greater evidence that this is true than that the world as a whole has today come to conscious grips over that most fundamental of problems: Shall all men cooperate in an effort to make a free, peaceful, orderly world, or shall we consent that strong men make a world to their liking, forcing us to live in it? more than that, train us to carry it on? It is well that the issue should be clear, so clear that each of us must be forced to choose.

the obsession of the Standard Oil Company, that danger lurked in small as well as great things, that nothing, however trivial, must live outside of its control.

Now and then I came upon a man or woman who dared to say to me when he had me in a corner: "I am a pacifist. We must find another way." With which I so heartily agreed. But that man or woman would not have said that on the street corner without danger to his life.