Carnegie Gospel Of Wealth Quotes

It is now thirteen years since I ceased to accumulate wealth and began to distribute it. I could never have succeeded in either had I stopped with having enough to retire upon, but nothing to retire to.

If we truly care for others we need not be anxious about their feelings for us. Like draws to like.

Certainly the man who makes his own wealth eclipses those who inherit rank from others.” I

Among the conditions of life or the laws of Nature, some of which seem to us faulty, some apparently unjust and merciless, there are many that amaze us by their beauty and sweetness. Love of home, regardless of its character or location, certainly is one of these.

I believe that higher wages to men who respect their employers and are happy and contented are a good investment, yielding, indeed, big dividends. The

Humanity is an organism, inherently rejecting all that is deleterious, that is, wrong, and absorbing after trial what is beneficial, that is, right. If so disposed, the Architect of the Universe, we must assume, might have made the world and man perfect, free from evil and from pain, as angels in heaven are thought to be; but although this was not done, man has been given the power of advancement rather than of retrogression. The Old and New Testaments remain, like other sacred writings of other lands, of value as records of the past and for such good lessons as they inculcate. Like the ancient writers of the Bible our thoughts should rest upon this life and our duties here. "To perform the duties of this world well, troubling not about another, is the prime wisdom," says Confucius, great sage and teacher. The next world and its duties we shall consider when we are placed in it.

tall oaks from little acorns grow.

is necessarily limited by his lack of knowledge of the circumstances

their surplus wealth to the mass of their fellows in the forms best calculated to do them lasting good. Thus is the problem of Rich and Poor to be solved. The laws of accumulation will be left free; the laws of distribution free. Individualism will continue, but the millionaire

I have never known a concern to make a decided success that did not do good, honest work, and even in these days of the 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.

It was in fact during the month of May 1889 that Carnegie was finishing up a magazine article to become known as 'The Gospel of Wealth,' in which he said, and much to the consternation of his Pittsburgh associates, 'The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.' The gist of the article was that the rich, like the poor, would always be with us. The present system had its inequalities, certainly, and many of them were disgraceful. But the system was a good deal better than any other so far. The thing for the rich man to do was to divide his life into two parts. The first part should be for acquisition, the second for distribution. At this stage the gentlemen of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club were attending strictly to the first part.

In an attempt to head off such stinging and potentially damaging criticism both Rockefeller and Carnegie poured hundreds of millions of dollars into public works. In Rockefeller’s case the money went to Chicago University, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (today Rockefeller University), and the General Education Board that announced it would teach children ‘to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way’. In 1913 he and his son established the Rockefeller Foundation that remains one of the richest charitable organisations in the world. Carnegie too used his money to encourage education. His grand scheme was to fund the opening of libraries, and between 1883 and 1929 more than 2,000 were founded all over the world. In many small towns in America and in Britain, the Carnegie Library is still one of their most imposing buildings, always specially designed and built in a wide variety of architectural styles. In 1889, Carnegie wrote his Gospel of Wealth first published in America and then, at the suggestion of Gladstone, in Britain. He said that it was the duty of a man of wealth to set an example of ‘modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance’, and, once he had provided ‘moderately’ for his dependents, to set up trusts through which his money could be distributed to achieve in his judgement, ‘the most beneficial result for the community’. Carnegie believed that the huge differences between rich and poor could be alleviated if the administration of wealth was judiciously and philanthropi-cally managed by those who possessed it. Rich men should start giving away money while they lived, he said. ‘By taxing estates heavily at death, the state marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire’s unworthy life.

Those worthy of assistance, except in rare cases, seldom require assistance

It was in fact during the month of May 1889 that Carnegie was finishing up a magazine article to become known as “The Gospel of Wealth,” in which he said, and much to the consternation of his Pittsburgh associates, “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.” The gist of the article was that the rich, like the poor, would always be with us. The present system had its inequities, certainly, and many of them were disgraceful. But the system was a good deal better than any other so far. The thing for the rich man to do was to divide his life into two parts. The first part should be for acquisition, the second for distribution. At

My advice to young men would be not only to concentrate their whole time and attention on the one business in life in which they engage, but to put every dollar of their capital into it.

True it is, we only hate those whom we do not know.

The story of a man's life, especially when it is told by the man himself, should not be interrupted by the hecklings of an editor.

the mind like the body can be moved from the shade into sunshine.

Long before Feeney popularized giving while living, the early-twentieth-century philanthropist Julius Rosenwald preached the same gospel—with a remarkably similar slogan, “Give While You Live.” The founder of Sears, Roebuck, Rosenwald’s name is now largely forgotten precisely because he didn’t emulate contemporaries like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie in creating a permanent foundation. Yet Rosenwald may have had as much impact as either philanthropist because of what he did do, which was to sink a lot of his fortune into helping build 5,300 schools for black children throughout the South. It was the kind of huge up-front capital investment that a more cautious foundation, mindful of preserving its endowment, would never have made. But Rosenwald’s cash and boldness had a transformative effect on African-American chances in the Jim Crow South, where his schools educated the likes of John Lewis, who helped lead the civil rights movement long after Rosenwald was gone.

Even the poorest can be made to see this, and to agree that great sums gathered by some of their fellow-citizens and spent for public purposes, from which the masses reap the principal benefit, are more valuable to them than if scattered among them through the course of many years in trifling amounts.

It were better for mankind that the millions of the rich were thrown into the sea than so spent as to encourage the slothful, the drunken, the unworthy. Of every thousand dollars spent in so-called charity to-day, it is probable that nine hundred and fifty dollars is unwisely spent