Standard Oil Company

Famous quotes containing the words standard, oil and/or company:

    An indirect quotation we can usually expect to rate only as better or worse, more or less faithful, and we cannot even hope for a strict standard of more and less; what is involved is evaluation, relative to special purposes, of an essentially dramatic act.
    Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)

    Can he who has discovered only some of the values of whalebone and whale oil be said to have discovered the true use of the whale?
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self.... What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself—a troupe of players that I have internalised, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required.... I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.
    Philip Roth (b. 1933)