Your memory about Carnegie is incorrect. You should study his life.
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Philosophy
Andrew Carnegie Dictum
In his final days, Carnegie suffered from bronchial pneumonia. Before his death on August 11, 1919, Carnegie had donated $350,695,654 for various causes. The "Andrew Carnegie Dictum" was:
- To spend the first third of one's life getting all the education one can.
- To spend the next third making all the money one can.
- To spend the last third giving it all away for worthwhile causes.
Carnegie was involved in philanthropic causes, but he kept himself away from religious circles. He wanted to be identified by the world as a " positivist". He was highly influenced in public life by John Bright.
On wealth
As early as 1868, at age 33, he drafted a memo to himself. He wrote: "...The amassing of wealth is one of the worse species of idolatry. No idol more debasing than the worship of money." [45] In order to avoid degrading himself, he wrote in the same memo he would retire at age 35 to pursue the practice of philanthropic giving for "...the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced." However, he did not begin his philanthropic work in all earnest until 1881, with the gift of a library to his hometown of Dunfermline, Scotland. [46]
Carnegie wrote " The Gospel of Wealth", [47] an article in which he stated his belief that the rich should use their wealth to help enrich society.
The following is taken from one of Carnegie's memos to himself:
Man does not live by bread alone. I have known millionaires starving for lack of the nutriment which alone can sustain all that is human in man, and I know workmen, and many so-called poor men, who revel in luxuries beyond the power of those millionaires to reach. It is the mind that makes the body rich. There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else. Money can only be the useful drudge of things immeasurably higher than itself. Exalted beyond this, as it sometimes is, it remains Caliban still and still plays the beast. My aspirations take a higher flight. Mine be it to have contributed to the enlightenment and the joys of the mind, to the things of the spirit, to all that tends to bring into the lives of the toilers of Pittsburgh sweetness and light. I hold this the noblest possible use of wealth.[48] en.wikipedia.org |
