The first one was that the ideal conditions for business were never given. One had to create them.
And his second and main discovery was that self-interest, if properly directed, need not be divorced from the common good, as all the transactions he conducted throughout his life eloquently show.
These two principles (we make our own weather; personal gain oughtto be a public asset) I have always striven to follow. - P140
again he proved that personal profit and the common good were not at odds with each other but could become, incapable hands, two sides of the same coin. - P146
She was too fragile, too good for this world and slipped away from it much too soon. Words are not enough to say how dearly I miss her. The greatest gift I have ever received was my time by her side.
She saved me. There is no other way to put it. She saved me with her humanity and her warmth. Saved me with her love of beauty and herkindness. Saved me by making a home for me. - P158
It is hard work to give money away. It requires a great deal of planning and strategizing. If not managed properly, philanthropy can both harm the giver and spoil the receiver. Expand. Generosity is the mother of ingratitude. - P167
My actions safeguarded American industry and business. I protected our economy from unethical operators and destroyers of confidence. I also shielded free enterprise from the dictatorialthe Federal Government. Did I turn a profit from these actions? No doubt. But so will, in the long run, our nation, freed from both market piracy and state intervention. - P185
No one besides me would ever notice this connection, of course. Still, these encrypted and often involuntary allusions have fueled my work from thevery start. So again, in an imprecise way, I believed for all these years that if I tapped into that spring directly it would be contaminated or even dry out. But now, at seventy, it is different. Now I feel strong enough.
And this is why I find myself facing these implausibly open doors on thisfall morning. To revisit the place where I became a writer. To look for theanswers to the enigmas I thought had to be left unresolved so they could feedmy work. And to finally meet, even if it is only through her papers, Mildred Bevel. - P197
This was at the center of his business practice. "A selfish hand has a short country. This, Bevel insisted,
reach," he would often say. Or, "Profit and common good are but two sides of the same coin." Or, "Our prosperity is proof of our virtue." Wealth had, for him, an almost transcendental dimension. Nowhere was this clearer than in his legendary string of triumphs of 1926, he often repeated. While geared toward profit, his actions had invariably had the nation‘s best interest at heart. Business was a form of patriotism. As a consequence, his private life had become, increasingly, one with the life of the nation. - P275
They are, for the most part, thank-you letters. Musicians from all over the country thanking her for pianos, violoncellos and violins; conductors from small towns thanking her for the instruments and funding for their orchestras; mayors and congressmen thanking her for alibrary branch; a letter from Governor Al Smith thanking her for the wingfor the humanities at the State University of New York at Troy.
There is a shift in content in some letters after the 1929 crash. In addition to all her cultural patronage it is clear that she has been involved in helpingthose who lost everything during the crisis. Her emphasis is now on housingand on loans to businesses. The owners of factories, stores and farms write tolet her know how much the aid received has done for them and their commu-nities. But these letters are outnumbered by a renewed outpour of gratitude from the same kind of beneficiaries she favored in the past - libraries, musical institutions, universities. - P302
"True idealists, in contrast, care about the welfare of others above and especially against their own interests. If you enjoy your work or profit from it, how can you be sure you‘re truly doing it for others and not yourself?
Abnegation is the only road that leads to the greater good. - P334
Despite everything, I had consistently chosen to respect and look upto him. Only now did I realize how active and conscious that choice had been.
Year after Ihad made up for his shortcomings. Helped him be my parent. AndI had loved our hard, complicated life. And I had loved him for his dim yet unbending principles and passions and for his wild notions of freedom and independence. But now I had to find a way to love a new, still shapeless idea of him. - P343
Some journals are kept with the unspoken hope that they will be discovered long after the diarist‘s death, the fossil of an extinct species of one.
Others thrive on the belief that the only time each evanescent word will be read is as it‘s being written. And others yet address the writer‘s future self:
one‘s testament to be opened at one‘s resurrection. They declare, respectively, "I was," "I am," "I‘ll be."
Over the years, my diary has drifted from one of these categories tot he next and then back. It still does, even if my future is shallow. - P375
"Imagine the relief of finding out that one is not the one one thought one was" - P400
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