A man can't be hid. He may be a peddler in the mountains, but the world will find him out to make him a king of finance. He may be carrying cabbages from Long Island, when the world will demand that he run the railways of a continent. He may be a groceryman on a canal, when the country shall come to him and put him in his career of usefulness. So that there comes a time finally when all the green barrels of petroleum in the land suggest but two names and one great company.
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Sermon, "He Could Not Be Hid" (August 25, 1889). As reported in The New York Sun (August 26, 1889). Cited in Burton Stevenson, ed., The Home Book of Quotations (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1934), p. 631. See: The Literary Digest, vol. 50, no. 20 (May 15, 1915), "The Lexicographer's Easy Chair: A 'Mouse-trap' Quotation", p. 1196. Also: "Quote Origin: Build a Better Mousetrap", Quote Investigator (March 24, 2015)