"You can abuse me, you can strike me, so long as you let me have my way"
He liked to make Standard Oil sound like a philanthropic agency or an engel of mercy, come to succor downtrodden refiners. "We will take your burdens," he remembered telling his weaker brethren in 1872. "We will utilize your ability; we will give you representation; we will unite together and build a substantial structure on the basis of cooperation."
Rockefeller was concerned that if he advertised his own wealth through fancy houses, he might attract investors into the refining business and only worsen the excess capacity problem
"Do not many of who fail to achieve big things... fail because we lack concentration—the art of concentrating the mind on the thing to be done at the proper time and to the exclusion of everything else?"
"I can see him now, going over the long French bills, studying each item, many of them being unintelligible to him. "Poulets!" he would exclaim. "What are poulets, John?" Or again, "Bougies, bougies—what in the world is a bougie?" And so on down the bill. Father was never willing to pay a bill which he did not know to be correct in all its items. Such care in small things might seem penurious to some people, yet to him it was the working out of a life principle."
"Of course it is natural that the man who drove the stage coach should be antagonistic to the railroad and that the man who used to keep the small inn should look with disfavor upon the big, magnificent hotels"
Rockefeller placed a premium on recruiting the best people for leading positions. "John, we have money," he told his son, "but it will have value for mankind only as we can find able men with ideas, imagination and courage to put it into productive use."
"Probably the greatest single obstacle to the progress and happiness of the American people, lies in the willingness of so many men to invest their time and money in multiplying competitive industries instead of opening up new fields, and putting their money into lines of industry and development that are needed"
"Burning, I remain in the shadown,
As the setting sun retreats into its glow.
The others have gone to their life of pleasure,
I alone lie grieving, with the earth my measure"
"Alas! Alas! For the way I've been betrayed by rushing time!
By a mirror too, that told, had I conned it close, a story all too true.
It happens so, when regard's long overdue, like mine, for life's end.
But time's parade goes swiftly by, and overnight we're old.
Too late to repent, to set things right, to hold counsel within, with death obtruding so.
My own self was my foe.
Of no avail how much I weep and sigh: nothing annuls the waste of days gone by.
Alas! Alas! Revieweing all those days
There's not one-not one!-I come on there, in all that time, I truly call my own."
"Mine then, the power to give us, you and me, a long survival in-choose it-stone or color, faces just like our own, exact and true.
Though we're dead a thousand years, still men can see how beautiful you were. I, how much duller, and yet how far from a fool in loving you."
"So if my tears' constant flow
can dissolve a heart so hard,
far better I not exist
than live in fire and never die."
"A man who's truly wise,
not magnifying his own stature,
deals with no pleasure not within his power-too much can paralyze-
a modest creature of modest fortune lives quietly, hour by hour."
"When love's been weighed, assayed reined nobly in,
he who loves what nature gives commits no sin."
"When one lives—truly lives!—his will won't mesh with mortality;
nor are things eternal cast in the mould of time.
"Both ways torment me then:
being helped, being hurt-both deadly.
But we've seen who greatly love find worse:
being in between."
"The pilgrim soul can spy its own salvation in sport of love or war:
knowing how to lose beats scavenging for more"
“He stood on the doorstep of his room and the living room,” she recalls. “He didn’t come in. Kind of shy. Didn’t want to get into that. I threw popcorn on him. And he said, do you want to hear some great music?” -Shannon at an MIT party meeting his wife
“They had to seek him out. And in calling on him (knocking on his door, writing, visiting) one had to penetrate his shyness or elusiveness or—in the case of expecting a reply to a letter—his intractable habits of procrastination and his unwillingness to do anything that bored him.” About Shannon
“He would acknowledge that building devices like chess-playing machines “might seem a ridiculous waste of time and money. But I think the history of science has shown that valuable consequences often proliferate from simple curiosity.” “He never argued his ideas,” Brock McMillan says of Shannon. “If people didn’t believe in them, he ignored those people.”
“He would frequently receive letters from some of the most notable scientists in the world. And these, too, would languish. David Slepian recalls that the letters would eventually get herded into a folder he had labeled “Letters I’ve procrastinated in answering for too long.”
“My characterization of his smartness is that he would have been the world’s best con man if he had taken a turn in that direction,” Slepian says
“He once told an interviewer, “I think you impute a little more practical purpose to my thinking than actually exists. My mind wanders around, and I conceive of different things day and night. Like a science-fiction writer, I’m thinking, ‘What if it were like this?’ or, ‘Is there an interesting problem of this type?’ … It’s usually just that I like to solve a problem, and I work on these all the time.”
“Then a rumor spread that Shannon was there. As one of the attendees later told Scientific American, “it was as if Newton had showed up at a physics conference.”31 Later, when Shannon was asked to speak, he grew anxious, believing he had little of value to say, and took several balls out of his pocket. And then he juggled for the crowd.”