19th-century Philanthropist Quotes

Andrew Carnegie

John D. Rockefeller

J. P. Morgan

John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury

John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

Cornelius Vanderbilt

Rose Kennedy

You have undertaken to cheat me. I won't sue you, for the law is too slow. I'll ruin you.

Cornelius Vanderbilt

As so often before, liberty has been wounded in the house of its friends. Liberty in the wild and freakish hands of fanatics has once more, as frequently in the past, proved the effective helpmate of autocracy and the twin-brother of tyranny.

Otto Hermann Kahn

MAJOR URWICK and Dr. Metcalf have rendered a conspicuous service by editing this collection of Mary Follett's lectures on business management. They contain teaching which was of importance when the lectures were delivered, and which many people felt should be preserved in a collated form and given a wider public. The circumstances of today have increased that importance. Many people are being called upon to fill new administrative posts, and these lectures teach the principles which should underly all administrative method.

Seebohm Rowntree

We value a plant according to the delicacy and number of flowers it produces. And what joy flowers give! We remember them long after they are withered and dead.

Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle Sr.

On seeing the Morris Minor (British car) prototype:

It looks like a poached egg—we can't make that.

William Morris, 1st Viscount Nuffield

Nothing, I believe, can really teach us the nature and meaning of inspiration but personal experience of it. That we may all have such experience if we will but attend to the divine influences in our own hearts, is the cardinal doctrine of Quakerism.

Caroline Stephen

To be in contact with scientists, to become in a small way a scientist myself if possible, perhaps to cast new light on physical phenomena, to be able to uncover what is real and definitive, was my life's great dream.

Classic art was like a king who has the right to govern, punish, reward, and choose his favorites from an aristocracy, obliging them to adopt conventional rules as to manners, morals, and modes of speech. The new art tries to imitate nature in its unconsciousness, its moral indifference.

Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé

All the beautiful orders of architecture and creations of the pencil, all the conceptions of the beautiful in nature and art and humanity, are inventions extorted, as it were, from the mind to extend and increase the pleasures of sense.

The certain truth, that as warm a heart, as noble a nature, and as bright an intellect may be found under a yellow, a brown, or a black skin as under a white one.

Caroline Earle White

A man always has two reasons for what he does—a good one and the real one.

This country has given me so much that I am only too happy to be allowed to help it to develop and to be able to give back to it a fraction of what it has given to me.

You have not fulfilled every duty unless you have fulfilled that of being pleasant.

It has been said, 'time heals all wounds.' I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone.

Love seems to beautify and inspire all nature. It raises the earthly caterpillar into the ethereal butterfly, it paints the feathers in spring, it lights the glowworm's lamp, it wakens the song of birds, and inspires the poet's lay. Even inanimate Nature seems to feel the spell, and flowers glow with the richest colours.

John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury

O wondrous sphinx! within thy marble breast
What undreamed secrets lie concealed!
Hast thou no pity for my wild unrest
My maddening longing for the unrevealed?

Clara Jessup Moore

The finest flowers of genius have grown in an atmosphere where those of Nature are prone to droop, and difficult to bring to maturity.

Thousands are the children of poor foreigners who have permitted them to grow up without school, education, or religion. All the neglect and bad education and evil example of a poor class tend to form others, who, as they mature, swell the ranks of ruffians and criminals. So, at length, a great multitude of ignorant, untrained, passionate, irreligious boys and young men are formed who become the 'dangerous class' in their city.

Charles Loring Brace

There can be no reason why man should not make towns liveable and healthy... just as much subject to the beneficent influence of bright sunshine, fresh air, flowers, and plants, as the country.

Lord Leverhulme

Probably the greatest single obstacle to the progress and happiness of the American people lies in the willingness of so many men to invest their time and money in multiplying competitive industries instead of opening up new fields, and putting their money into lines of industry and development that are needed.

John D. Rockefeller

Giving is the secret of a healthy life. Not necessarily money, but whatever a man has of encouragement and sympathy and understanding.

John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.... It will purge the rottenness out of the system.

There is scarcely an instance of a man who has made a fortune by speculation and kept it

Andrew Carnegie