Consumerism Quote

The man who dies rich dies disgraced.

-Andrew Carnegie

Carnegie, in his day, was one of the world's wealthiest men, a steel tycoon with an empire worth nearly half a billion dollars, which, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, would be worth well over ten billion dollars in today's money. Carnegie was also a very charitable man. When he sold his company for roughly $400 million, he began to dispose of it at a rapid rate, funding libraries and other such public buildings to further education, donating and giving away all but about fifty million.

Carnegie believed no one needed that much wealth, and that holding that much wealth was a sin against the fellow man. He believed it was one's human duty to aid those in need when one had that kind of wealth and power with which to do it, and if one held that vast amount of riches by the time of his death he was an evil and disgraced man.