Upon the sacredness of property civilization itself depends-the right of the laborer to his hundred dollars in the savings bank, and equally the legal right of the millionaire to his millions.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of property rights for both the laborer and the wealthy, as foundational to civilization.
Andrew Carnegie's quote underscores the essential role that property rights play in maintaining the structure of civilization. By asserting that both the modest savings of a laborer and the vast wealth of a millionaire are equally sacred, Carnegie highlights the significance of legal rights to ownership as crucial for societal stability and progress. This perspective advocates for a system where all individuals, regardless of their economic standing, are afforded the same respect for their property.
In practice
In a speech about economic fairness, one could use this quote to illustrate the essential nature of property rights.
Give me the life of the boy whose mother is nurse, seamstress, washerwoman, cook, teacher, angel, and saint, all in one, and whose father is guide, exemplar, and friend. No servants to come between. These are the boys who are born to the best fortune.
To kill a man will be considered as disgusting [in the twentieth century] as we in this day consider it disgusting to eat one.
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.
You are what you think. So just think big, believe big, act big, work big, give big, forgive big, laugh big, love big and live big.
Speculation is a parasite feeding upon values, creating none.
Don't be content with doing only your duty. Do more than your duty. It's the horse that finishes a neck ahead that wins the race.
We must therefore rediscover, after the natural world, the social world, not as an object or sum of objects, but as a permanent field or dimension of existence.
Reckoned physiologically, everything ugly weakens and afflicts man. It recalls decay, danger, impotence; he actually suffers a loss of energy in its presence. The effect of the ugly can be measured with a dynamometer. Whenever man feels in any way depressed, he senses the proximity of something ugly. His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride - they decline with the ugly, they increase with the beautiful.
There is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.
Death walks faster than the wind and never returns what he has taken.
Day after day I read Freud, thinking myself to be very enlightened and scientific when, as a matter of fact, I was about as scientific as an old woman secretly poring over books about occultism, trying to tell her own fortune, and learning how to dope out the future form the lines in the palm of her hand. I don't know if I ever got very close to needing a padded cell: but if I ever had gone crazy, I think psychoanalysis would have been the one thing chiefly responsible for it.
What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.
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