Andrew Carnegie Quotes

140 Andrew Carnegie Quotes

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The first man gets the oyster, the second man gets the shell.
Andrew Carnegie

You cannot push anyone up a ladder unless he is willing to climb…
Andrew Carnegie

The men who have succeeded are men who have chosen one line and stuck to it.
Andrew Carnegie

The thorough man of business knows that only by years of patient, unremitting attention to affairs can he earn his reward, which is the result, not of chance, but of well-devised means for the attainment to ends.
Andrew Carnegie

There is no way of making a business successful that can vie with the policy of promoting those who render exceptional service.
Andrew Carnegie

The secret of happiness is renunciation.
Andrew Carnegie

No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor.
Andrew Carnegie

Put all good eggs in one basket and then watch that basket.
Andrew Carnegie

The effect of attention to quality, upon every man in the service, from the president of the concern down to the humblest laborer, cannot be overestimated.
Andrew Carnegie

I have never known a concern to make a decided success that did not do good, honest work, and even in these days of fiercest competition, when everything would seem to be a matter of price, there lies still at the root of great business success the very much more important factor of quality. The effect of attention to quality, upon every man in the service, from the president of the concern down to the humblest laborer, cannot be overestimated.
Andrew Carnegie



At the end, the acquisition of wealth is ignoble in the extreme. I assume that you save and long for wealth only as a means of enabling you the better to do some good in your day and generation.
Andrew Carnegie

The average person puts only 25% of his energy and ability into his work. The world takes off its hat to those who put in more than 50% of their capacity, and stands on its head for those few and far between souls who devote 100%.
Andrew Carnegie

I have had a long, long life full of troubles, but there is one curious fact about them-nine-tenths of them never happened.
Andrew Carnegie

I believe the true road to preeminent success in any line is to make yourself master of that line.
Andrew Carnegie

A word, a look, an accent, may affect the destiny not only of individuals, but of nations. He is a bold man who calls anything a trifle.
Andrew Carnegie

My supply of Scotch caution never has been small; but I was apparently something of a daredevil now and then to the manufacturing fathers of Pittsburgh. They were old and I was young, which made all the difference.
Andrew Carnegie

It is not the rich man’s son that the young struggler for advancement has to fear in the race for life, nor his nephew, nor his cousin. Let him look out for the dark horse in the boy who begins by sweeping out the office.
Andrew Carnegie

Nothing tells in the long run like a good judgment, and no sound judgment can remain with the man whose mind is disturbed by the mercurial changes of the stock exchange. It places him under an influence akin to intoxication. What is not, he sees, and what he sees, is not.
Andrew Carnegie

It marks a big step in a man’s development when he comes to realize that other men can be called in to help him do a better job than he can do alone.
Andrew Carnegie

The surest foundation of a manufacturing concern is quality. After that, and a long way after, comes cost.
Andrew Carnegie



The thorough man of business knows that only by years of patient, unremitting attention to affairs can he earn his reward, which is the result, not of chance, but of well-devised means for the attainment to ends.
Andrew Carnegie

Surplus wealth is a sacred trust which its possessor is bound to administer in his lifetime for the good of the community.
Andrew Carnegie

The price which society pays for the law of competition… is…great; but the advantages of this law are also greater still… for it is to this law that we owe our wonderful material development, which brings improved conditions in its train. But whether the law be benign or not, we must say of it… it is here; we cannot evade it; no substitutes for it have been found; and while the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department.
Andrew Carnegie

No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit for doing it.
Andrew Carnegie

The secret of success lies not in doing your own work, but in recognizing the right man to do it.
Andrew Carnegie

Golf is the indispensable adjunct of high civilization.
Andrew Carnegie

Show me your cost sheets. It is far more interesting to know how cheaply and how well you have done this than how much money you have made. The one is only a temporary result, due possibly to some special condition of trade, but the other means a permanency that will go on with the works as long as they last.
Andrew Carnegie

It is surprising how few men appreciate the enormous dividends derivable from investment in their own business. There is scarcely a manufacturer in the world who has not in his works some machinery that should be thrown out and replaced by improved appliances; or who does not for the want of additional machinery or new methods lose more than sufficient to pay the largest dividend obtainable by investment beyond his own domain. And yet most businessmen whom I have known invest in bank shares and in faraway enterprises, while the true gold mine lies right in their own factories.
Andrew Carnegie

One of the chief sources of success in manufacturing is the introduction and strict maintenance of a perfect system of accounting so that responsibility for money or materials can be brought home to every man. Owners who, in the office, would not trust a clerk with five dollars without having a check on him, were supplying tons of materials daily to men in the mills without exacting an account of their stewardship by weighing what each returned in the finished form.
Andrew Carnegie

A little more money and you could have had the destructible wrought iron and your bridge would stand against any steamboat. We never have built and we never will build a cheap bridge. Ours don’t fall.
Andrew Carnegie



If you want a contract, be on the spot when it is let. … If possible, stay on hand until you can take the written contract home in your pocket.
Andrew Carnegie

[On stock speculators] The molehill seems to him a mountain and the mountain a molehill, and he jumps at conclusions which he should arrive at by reason. His mind is upon the stock quotations and not upon the points that require calm thought.
Andrew Carnegie

I estimate that of every thousand dollars spent in so-called charity, nine hundred and fifty of them had better be thrown into the sea.
Andrew Carnegie

Years ago I distributed charity indiscriminately, and in doing so committed perhaps the greatest evil I have committed in my life.
Andrew Carnegie

It took me some time to learn, but I did learn that the supremely great manager, such as you have these days, never do any work themselves worth speaking about, their point is to make others work while they think. I applied this lesson in after life, so that business with me has never been a care.
Andrew Carnegie

I believe socialism is the grandest theory ever presented…
Andrew Carnegie

I do not spend much on myself. I give away every year seven or eight times as much as I spend for personal comforts and pleasures.
Andrew Carnegie

In all my life, I suppose I have done more work than any employee I ever had…
Andrew Carnegie

[On leaving children an inheritance] I should as soon leave to my son a curse as ‘the almighty dollar’.
Andrew Carnegie

He is a bold man who calls anything a trifle.
Andrew Carnegie



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