Jay Gould Quotes (10 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Jay Gould: 10 quotes 0 likes

Famous Jay Gould Quotes

“Corporations are going, we are told, to destroy the country. But what would this country be but for corporations? Who have developed it? Corporations. Who transact the most marvelous business the world has ever seen? Corporations.”

Jay Gould

Interview with the New York Herald
Jay Gould : A Character Sketch (1893)

“The ultimate result will be to annihilate Indians the & open up the Big Horn & Black Hills to development & settlement & in this way greatly benefit us.”

Jay Gould

Letter to Silas H. H. Clark (1876) regarding the Great Sioux War, quoted in Union Pacific: 1862-1893 by Maury Klein

“My idea is, that if capital and labor are left alone they will mutually regulate each other. People who think they can regulate all mankind and get wrong ideas which they believe to be panaceas for every ill cause much trouble to both employers and employees by their interference.”

Jay Gould

Testimony to the New York Senate Committee on Labor and Education"
Jay Gould : A Character Sketch (1893)

“I have the disadvantage of not being sociable. Wall Street men are fond of company and sport. A man makes one hundred thousand dollars there and immediately buys a yacht, begins to race fast horses, and becomes a sport generally. My tastes lie in a different direction. When business hours are over I go home and spend the remainder of the day with my wife, my children, and books of my library. Every man has natural inclinations of his own. Mine are domestic. They are not calculated to make me particularly popular in Wall Street, and I cannot help that.”

Jay Gould

Also quoted in The Life and Legend of Jay Gould (1986) by Maury Klein
Jay Gould : A Character Sketch (1893)

“I sometimes think I wouldn't like to give up business entirely. The care and worriment attending large business interests are very great, but besides that fact the manner in which motives are impugned and characters assailed is most unpleasant”

Jay Gould

As quoted in the Commercial and Financial Chronicle (25 March 1882)

“I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”

Jay Gould

Frequently attributed, often in the context of strikebreaking activities during the Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886. See for example Philip Sheldon Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Volume 2‎ - Page 50 (1975). A contemporary source has not been identified. Varying forms of the quotation circulated in the labor press as early as 1893, with or without the attribution to Gould.
Attributed