The Prize Quotes

“A wise old owl lived in an oak, The more he saw the less he spoke, The less he spoke, the more he heard, Why aren’t we all like that old bird?”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“The Western world, he believed, was afflicted by the curse of short-term thinking, the inevitable result of democracy.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“The battlefields of World War I established the importance of petroleum as an element of national power when the internal combustion machine overtook the horse and the coal-powered locomotive.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“Oil men, like producers of other raw materials, could not continue to sell their products below cost...For prices to be raised, production had to be controlled, and to bring production under control, Ickes began with an all-out campaign against the "hot oiler,"...This bootleg oil was secretly siphoned off from pipelines, hidden in camouflaged tanks that were covered with weeds, moved about both in an intrcate network of secret pipelines and by trucks, and then smuggled across state borders at night.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“Simplicity rules everything worth while, and whenever I have been up against a business proposition which, after taking thought, I could not reduce to simplicity, I have realized that it was hopelessly wrong and I have let it alone.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“The author points to the impact of what he called Dutch disease, where the discovery of found wealth from a particular commodity causes a culture to atrophy with respect to work ethic and broader development. Continuing wealth from the single commodity is taken for granted. The government, flush with wealth, is expected to be generous. When the price of that commodity drops, a government which would remain in power dare not cut back on this generosity.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“Mastery itself was the prize of the venture.”1”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power

“Another obstacle was the stubbornness of the countries the pipeline had to cross, particularly Syria, all of which were demanding what seemed to be exorbitant transit fees. It was also the time when the partition of Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel were aggravating American relations with the Arab countries. But the emergence of a Jewish state, along with the American recognition that followed, threatened more than transit rights for the pipeline. Ibn Saud was as outspoken and adamant against Zionism and Israel as any Arab leader. He said that Jews had been the enemies of Arabs since the seventh century. American support of a Jewish state, he told Truman, would be a death blow to American interests in the Arab world, and should a Jewish state come into existence, the Arabs “will lay siege to it until it dies of famine.” When Ibn Saud paid a visit to Aramco’s Dhahran headquarters in 1947, he praised the oranges he was served but then pointedly asked if they were from Palestine—that is, from a Jewish kibbutz. He was reassured; the oranges were from California. In his opposition to a Jewish state, Ibn Saud held what a British official called a “trump card”: He could punish the United States by canceling the Aramco concession. That possibility greatly alarmed not only the interested companies, but also, of course, the U.S. State and Defense departments. Yet the creation of Israel had its own momentum. In 1947, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine recommended the partition of Palestine, which was accepted by the General Assembly and by the Jewish Agency, but rejected by the Arabs. An Arab “Liberation Army” seized the Galilee and attacked the Jewish section of Jerusalem. Violence gripped Palestine. In 1948, Britain, at wit’s end, gave up its mandate and withdrew its Army and administration, plunging Palestine into anarchy. On May 14, 1948, the Jewish National Council proclaimed the state of Israel. It was recognized almost instantly by the Soviet Union, followed quickly by the United States. The Arab League launched a full-scale attack. The first Arab-Israeli war had begun. A few days after Israel’s proclamation of statehood, James Terry Duce of Aramco passed word to Secretary of State Marshall that Ibn Saud had indicated that “he may be compelled, in certain circumstances, to apply sanctions against the American oil concessions… not because of his desire to do so but because the pressure upon him of Arab public opinion was so great that he could no longer resist it.” A hurriedly done State Department study, however, found that, despite the large reserves, the Middle East, excluding Iran, provided only 6 percent of free world oil supplies and that such a cut in consumption of that oil “could be achieved without substantial hardship to any group of consumers.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“We have got to find a a new plan of attacking it. Something that will show clearly not only the magnitude of the industries and commercial developments, and the changes they have brought in various parts of the country, but something which will make clear the great principles by which industrial leaders are combining and controlling these resources. ”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“Late in the day, during business meetings, he would lie down on a couch, tell his colleagues to continue, and participate in the discussions while stretched out on his back.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“the Iranian Crisis of 1946 was the first major East-West confrontation of the Cold War.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“The Americans even exacted their revenge for Pearl Harbor in April 1943, when cryptanalysts learned that Admiral Yamamoto, who had planned the deadly attack, was due to make a visit to the island of Bougainville, near New Guinea. American fighters, waiting in ambush, came out of the clouds and sent the admiral down in flames to his death in the jungle below.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power

“every system has within it the seeds of its own destruction”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“committed a small oversight, and yet one that almost destroyed their venture. They had assumed that they would deliver the kerosene in bulk to various localities, and that the eager customers would line up with their own receptacles to be filled. The customers were expected to use old Standard Oil tin cans. But they did not. Throughout the Far East, Standard’s blue oil tins had become a prized mainstay of the local economies, used to construct everything from roofing to birdcages to opium cups, hibachis, tea strainers, and egg beaters. They were not about to give up such a valuable product. The whole scheme was now threatened—not by the machinations of 26 Broadway or by the politics of the Suez Canal, but by the habits and predilections of the peoples of Asia. A local crisis was created in each port, as the kerosene went unsold, and despairing telegrams began to flow into Houndsditch. In the quickness and ingenuity of his response to the crisis, Marcus proved his entrepreneurial genius. He sent out a chartered ship, filled with tinplate, to the Far East, and simply instructed his partners in Asia to begin manufacturing tin receptacles for the kerosene. No matter that no one knew how to do so; no matter that no one had the facilities. Marcus persuaded them they could do it. “How do you stick on the wire handles?” the agent in Singapore wrote to Samuel’s representative in Japan. Instructions were sent. “What color do you suggest?” cabled the agent in Shanghai. Mark gave the answer—“Red!”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“For me, there is no strategy that is divorced from profitability,”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“The bloom of health, and life, to man will bring;
As from her depths the magic liquid flows,
To calm our sufferings, and assuage our woes.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power

“Never give orders—give instructions. … Make a game out of your work. … The greatest dividend in human life is happiness.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“mufti”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“the”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“January 1861, fell to 50 cents by June and, by the end of 1861, were down”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“company after, he finally”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.” Energetic”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power

“There is no substitute for energy,” Schumacher said in 1964, echoing Jevons, the nineteenth-century economist and celebrator of coal. “The whole edifice of modern life is built upon it. Although energy can be bought and sold like any other commodity, it is not ‘just another commodity,’ but the precondition of all commodities, a basic factor equally with air, water and earth.” Schumacher argued vigorously for the use of coal to supply the world’s energy needs. Oil, he believed, was a finite resource”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“jet fuel,”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“As in the 1960s, oil and energy were now available in abundance and, thus, they were not a constraint on economic growth. Supplies were safe again. Excess oil capacity around the world exceeded demand by 10 million barrels per day, equivalent to 20 percent of the free world’s consumption.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“objective, it said, was to push Gulf into transferring half of its U.S. oil and gas reserves into a royalty trust, which would be owned directly by the stockholders, giving them the cash flow and eliminating the double taxation on dividends.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“It was very handy to have such a foreign scapegoat when so much was wrong at home.1”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“Getty’s 55-cent-a-barrel royalty to the Saudis loomed over Aminoil’s 35-cent royalty to Kuwait, the roughly 33-cent royalty that Aramco had just been compelled to pay the Saudis—and far overshadowed the 16½ cents that Anglo-Iranian and the Iraq Petroleum Company were paying in Iran and Iraq respectively, as well as the 15-cent royalty that the Kuwait Oil Company was paying.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“In the 1920s, he decided that it was cheaper to drill for oil than to buy the overvalued shares of other oil companies. After the 1929 stock market crash, he completely changed tack; he saw that oil shares were selling at a great discount to assets, and he turned to prospecting for oil on the floor of the stock exchange—in”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power