Andrew Carnegie Quotes

140 Andrew Carnegie Quotes

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While statistics say that 95 percent of all young men who enter business fail, this should not discourage anyone. Go out with the spirit ‘sink or swim’, and a person will not sink.
Andrew Carnegie

The highest title which a man can write upon the page of history is his own name.
Andrew Carnegie

Concentrate your energies, your thoughts and your capital… The wise man puts all his eggs in one basket and watches the basket.
Andrew Carnegie

[On US tariffs in 1908] Take back your protection; we are now men, and we can beat the world at the manufacture of steel.
Andrew Carnegie

It is the duty of the man of wealth: first to set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance.
Andrew Carnegie

Don’t be content with doing only your duty. Do more than your duty. It’s the horse that finishes a neck ahead wins the race.
Andrew Carnegie

I’m not in the business of making steel. I’m in the business of building men. They make steel.
Andrew Carnegie

From shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations.
Andrew Carnegie

Strictly speaking, a man, to be in business, must be at least part owner of the enterprise which he manages and to which he gives his attention, and chiefly dependent for his revenues not upon salary but upon its profits.
Andrew Carnegie

[Part of his views on philanthropy] The man who dies rich, dies disgraced.
Andrew Carnegie



The ablest presidents are hampered by boards of directors and shareholders, who can know but little of the business.
Andrew Carnegie

The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth…
Andrew Carnegie

The contrast between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer with us today measures the change which has come with civilization.
Andrew Carnegie

Without wealth there can be no Mæcenas. The ‘good old times’ were not good old times. Neither master nor servant was as well situated then as today.
Andrew Carnegie

It is a waste of time to criticise the inevitable.
Andrew Carnegie

The poor enjoy what the rich could not before afford. What were the luxuries have become the necessaries of life.
Andrew Carnegie

Under the law of competition, the employer of thousands is forced into the strictest economies, among which the rates paid to labor figure prominently, and often there is friction between the employer and the employed, between capital and labor, between rich and poor.
Andrew Carnegie

We accept… the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race.
Andrew Carnegie

It must either go forward or fall behind: to stand still is impossible.
Andrew Carnegie

It is criminal to waste our energies in endeavoring to uproot, when all we can profitably or possibly accomplish is to bend the universal tree of humanity a little in the direction most favorable to the production of good fruit under existing circumstances.
Andrew Carnegie



The Law of Accumulation of Wealth, and the Law of Competition…these are the highest results of human experience, the soil in which society so far has produced the best fruit.
Andrew Carnegie

What is the proper mode of administering wealth after the laws upon which civilization is founded have thrown it into the hands of the few?
Andrew Carnegie

There are but three modes in which surplus wealth can be disposed of. It call be left to the families of the decedents; or it can be bequeathed for public purposes; or, finally, it can be administered during their lives by its possessors.
Andrew Carnegie

Why should men leave great fortunes to their children? If this is done from affection, is it not misguided affection?
Andrew Carnegie

Great sums bequeathed oftener work more for the injury than for the good of the recipients.
Andrew Carnegie

There are instances of millionaires' sons unspoiled by wealth, who, being rich, still perform great services in the community. Such are the very salt of the earth, as valuable as, unfortunately, they are rare…
Andrew Carnegie

[On bequeathing money in a will to public purposes] Men who leave vast sums in this way may fairly be thought men who would not have left it at all, had they been able to take it with them.
Andrew Carnegie

Men who continue hoarding great sums all their lives, the proper use of which for - public ends would work good to the community, should be made to feel that the community, in the form of the state, cannot thus be deprived of its proper share.
Andrew Carnegie

Mr. Tilden's bequest of five millions of dollars for a free library in the city of New York, but in referring to this one cannot help saying involuntarily, how much better if Mr. Tilden had devoted the last years of his own life to the proper administration of this immense sum; in which case neither legal contest nor any other cause of delay could have interfered with his aims.
Andrew Carnegie

It were better for mankind that the millions of the rich were thrown in to the sea than so spent as to encourage the slothful, the drunken, the unworthy.
Andrew Carnegie



Neither the individual nor the race is improved by alms-giving.
Andrew Carnegie

The man who dies leaving behind many millions of available wealth, which was his to administer during life, will pass away " unwept, unhonored, and unsung," no matter to what uses he leaves the dross which he cannot take with him.
Andrew Carnegie

A sunny disposition is worth more than fortune.
Andrew Carnegie

Laugh trouble away if possible…
Andrew Carnegie

One of the chief enjoyments of my childhood was the keeping of pigeons and rabbits.
Andrew Carnegie

How foolish we are not to recognize what we are best fitted for…
Andrew Carnegie

The one vital lesson in iron and steel that I learned in Britain was the necessity for owning raw materials…
Andrew Carnegie

A manufacturing concern in a growing country… begins to decay when it stops extending.
Andrew Carnegie

There is no labor so cheap as the dearest in the mechanical field…
Andrew Carnegie

The nation that has the best home market… can soon outsell the foreign producer.
Andrew Carnegie



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