Elbert Hubbard

“ Life consists in betting on your power to do—to achieve—to accomplish—to climb—to become. If you mistake hornets for birds, you pay the penalty for your error, as you pay for all mistakes. The only men who do things are those who dare.
Safety can be secured by doing nothing, saying nothing, being nothing. Here's to those who dare!
Because a thing had never been done before was to Peter Cooper no reason why it should not be done now. And although he innocently stirred up a few hornets' nests, he became a good judge of both birds and hornets through personal experience. ”

“ It is a wonderful bit of psychology—this giving with an obligation—and Andrew Carnegie is not only the Prince of Ironmasters, but he is a pedagogic prestidigitator, and an artistic financial hypnotist. Not only does he give the library, but he sets half the town hustling to maintain it. The actual good comes, not from the library building, but from the human impulses set in motion—the direction given to thousands of lives. The library is merely an excuse—a rallying-point—and around it swings and centers the best life of the town. ”

“ There may be men who love the money itself, but surely this man didn't. He was daring in its use—he had the courage to take risks. His was a quest for power.
When about twenty, he traveled as far as Hanover to visit a kinsman, and there he served for several months in a bank. He had a mind like those Japanese who travel to absorb, and waste no time in battling error.
Returning to Frankfort he transformed his father's little store into a bank and filled the window with real money, to the great delight and astonishment of the neighbors. ”

“ Give to most people and they will quit work and get a job with George Arliss, for the devil still finds mischief for idle hands to do.
To relieve the average man from work would simply increase the trade in cigarettes, cocaine, bromide and strong drink, and supply candidates for Sing Sing. To make a vast fortune and then lose the tailboard out of your hearse and dump your wealth on a lazy world merely causes the growler to circulate rapidly. And so we sympathize with Andrew Carnegie in his endeavor to live up to his dictum to die poor, and yet not pauperize the world by his wealth. ”

“ In judging a man we must in justice to ourselves ask, "What effect has this man's life, taken as a whole, had on the world?"
To lift out samples here and there and hold them up does not give us the man, any more than a sample brick gives you a view of the house. And viewing the life of Rogers for years, from the time he saw the light of a whale-oil lamp in Fairhaven, to the man as we behold him now, we must acknowledge his initiative and his power. He gave profitable work to millions. He directly made homes and comforts possible for thousands upon thousands. ”

“ He realized that he was a part of the people, and he knew that he wanted nothing for himself which the world could not have on the same terms. He looked into the calm depths of his own heart and saw that he hated tyranny, pretense, vice, hypocrisy, extravagance and untruth. He knew in the silence of his own soul that he loved harmony, health, industry, reciprocity, truth and helpfulness. His desire was to benefit mankind, and to help himself by helping others. ”

“ At Girard College there are now constantly more than two thousand boys, who have a home and school advantages. There are certain grave dangers about institutional homes for children, in that there is a strong tendency to kill individuality. But certain it is that Girard College has ever labored, and in a great degree succeeded, in minimizing this tendency. It is the proud boast that any boy who is graduated at Girard is able to take care of himself—he can do things that the world wants done and is willing to pay for. ”

“ Too many men are alive who have been moved, pushed and gently jostled out of the way by him, as he forged to the front. Perspective is required in order to get rid of prejudice. But the work of James J. Hill is dedicated to time; and Clio will eventually write his name high on her roster as a great modern prophet, a creator, a builder. Pericles built a city, but this man made an empire. Smiling farms, thriving schools, busy factories and happy homes sprang into being in the sunlight of prosperity which he made possible, and as yet the wealth of the "Hill Country" is practically untapped. ”

“ The motto was, never let a customer go without selling him something. The rule now is to sell people what they want, but never urge any one to buy.
Both buyer and seller then enjoyed these fencing-bouts of the bazaar. The time for simple dealing between man and man had not yet come. To haggle, banter and blarney were parts of the game, and parts which the buyer demanded as his right. He would trade only at places where he thought he was getting the start of the dealer and where his cleverness had an opportunity for exercise. ”

“ John Wanamaker, of all men in America, seems to know that to stand still is to retreat. For more than forty years he has led the vanguard of the business world. He has been a teacher of merchants. His insight, initiative, originality and prophetic judgment have set the retailers of the world a pace. Many have learned much from him, and all have been influenced by him. ”

“ Philanthropy now seeks to lay hold on the age to come. We are building for the future.
The embryo has eyes, ears and organs of speech. But the embryo does not see, nor hear, nor speak. It is laying hold on the age to come—it is preparing to live—it is getting ready for the future. The past is dead, the present is dying, and only that which is to come is alive.
The life of George Peabody was not in what he gave, but in what he taught the millionaires that are to be. ”

“ It was an enviable position for any young man. Of course there were the wiseheimers then as now, and statements were made that The Pratt Oil Company had been pushed to the wall, and would shortly have its neck wrung by John D. Rockefeller and have to start all over. But these prophets knew neither Rockefeller nor Rogers, and much less the resources and wants of the world. In very truth, neither the brothers Rockefeller, Rogers, nor Archbold, nor any one of that score of men who formed The Standard Oil Company, ever anticipated, even in their wildest dreams, the possibilities in the business. ”

“ Petroleum has yielded up over two thousand distinct substances, wooed by the loving, eager caress of the chemist. All the elements that go to make up the earth are there. Hundreds of articles used in commerce and in our daily lives are gotten from petroleum. To secure these in a form fit for daily use was the tireless task of Henry H. Rogers. Not by his own hands, of course, for life is too short for that, but the universities of the round world have been called upon for their men of brains. ”

“ Carnegie has favored two individuals: Booker T. Washington and Luther Burbank. And so far as I know, these are the only men in America who should be endowed. Even the closest search, as well as a careful scrutiny in the mirror, fails to find any one else whom it would be wise or safe to make immune from the struggle.
To make a man secure against the exigencies of life is to kill his ambition and destroy his incentive. To transform a man into a jellyfish, give him a fixed allowance, regardless of what he does. This truth also applies to women. ”

“ And no matter how great your invention, how sweet your song, how sublime your picture, how perfect your card-system, until you are able to convince the world that it needs the thing, and you get the money for it, you are not a Businessman. ”

“ The people who owned the shares or the tools, never saw the people who used the tools. A great gulf lay between them. For the wrongs and injustices visited upon the workers no one person was to blame. The fault was shifted. Everybody justified himself. And then came the saying, "Corporations have no souls."
Robert Owen was manager of a mill, yet he saw the misery, the ignorance and the mental indifference that resulted from the factory system. He, too, must produce dividends, but the desire of his heart was also to mitigate the lot of the workers. ”

“ Poverty and persecution seem necessary factors in fixing upon a people a distinctive and peculiar religion. Persecution and poverty have no power to stamp out a religion—all they do is to stain it deeper into the hearts of its votaries. Centuries of starvation and repression deepened the religious impulses of the Irish, and it has ever been the same with the Jews. ”

“ This is not philanthropy of a high order, perhaps, but Rogers hated both the words "charitable" and "philanthropic" as applied to himself. All he claimed to be was a businessman who paid his debts and who tried to make others pay theirs. The people he helped were the people he knew, or had known, and they were folks who had helped him. He never forgot a benefit—nor a wrong. He was a very human individual. To give to a person where the account is not balanced by a mutual service is, probably, to add an enemy to your list. ”

“ He could wait on store, tend baby, wash a blue wagon, drive a "horse and team" and say "backsshe!" in a way that would throw you off the front seat when the horse stopped, if you didn't look out.
That is to say, he was a New England village boy, alive and alert to every phase of village life—strong, rapid, willing, helpful. The villager who knows too much gets "fresh" and falls a victim of arrested development. The boy in a village who works, and then gets out into a wider sphere at that critical period when the wanderlust strikes him, is in the line of evolution. ”

“ Well did the Reverend Newman Hall say, in his funeral oration: "George Peabody waged a war against want and woe. He created homes; he never desolated one.
"He sided with the friendless and the houseless, and his life was guided by a law of love which none could ever wish to repeal. His was the task of cementing the hearts of Briton and American, pointing both to their duty to God and to humankind."
A. T. STEWART [Pg 332]
[Pg 333]
The merchant of the future will not only be an economist and an industrial leader—he will also be a teacher and a humanitarian. ”

“ In building and endowing Cooper Union, he outlined a system of education so beneficent that it attracted the attention of the thinking men of the world. And it is even now serving as a model upon which our entire public-school system will yet be founded—a system that works not for culture, for bric-a-brac purposes, but for character and competence. ”

“ The Bank of Montreal did the trick, and a committee of Dutchmen arrived to look over their Minnesota holdings with a view of selling out. Mr. Hill took them over the line—a dreary waste of slashings, then a wide expanse of prairie broken now and again by scrub-oak and hazel-groves; deep gullies here and there—swamps, sloughs and ponds, with assets of brant, wild geese, ducks and sand-hill cranes. ”

“ The entire fortune of George Peabody, including what he gave away during his life and what he left, was twelve million dollars. This is just the income of Andrew Carnegie for six months. We scarcely realize how much civilization smells of paint until we remember [Pg 304] that George Peabody was the world's first philanthropist. No doubt there were many people before him, with philanthropic impulses, but they were poor. It's easy to sympathize with humanity when you have nothing to give but advice. The miracle comes in when great wealth and great love of mankind are combined in one individual. ”

“ Five hundred letters a day are sent to Andrew Carnegie, with suggestions concerning the best way in which he can escape disgrace. The lazzaroni of America are as bad as the same tribe in Italy, only they play for bigger stakes. The altruistic graft is as greedy as the grab of commercialism, that much-berated thing.
Mr. Carnegie can not walk a block on Broadway without being beset by would-be philanthropists who offer to pit their time against his money, and thereby redeem the world from its sin and folly. ”

“ James Oliver loved old people and he loved children. He realized that the awful burdens and woes of war fall on the innocent and the helpless. And so the business of converting sword metal into plow metal made an appeal to him. Being a metal-worker and knowing much of the history of the metals, he knew of the "Toledo blade"—that secret and marvelous invention with its tremendous strength, keen cutting edge and lightness. To make a moldboard as finely tempered in [Pg 67] its way as a "Toledo blade" was his ambition. ”

“ The success of capital lies in ministering to the people, not in taking advantage of them. And every successful business house is built on the bed-rock of reciprocity, mutuality and co-operation. That legal Latin maxim, "Let the buyer beware," is a legal fiction. It should read, "Let the seller beware," for he who is intent on selling the people a different article from what they want, or at a price beyond its value, will stay in trade about as long as that famous snowball will last in Biloxi. ”

“ He thought that farmers should be the most intelligent, the most healthy and the happiest people on earth—nothing was too good for a farmer. "Your businessmen are only middlemen—the farmer digs his wealth out of the ground," he used to say.
He quoted Brigham Young's advice to the Mormons: "Raise food-products and feed the miners and you will all get rich. But if you mine for gold and silver, a very few will get rich, and the most of you will die poor." [Pg 73]
So there is the point: James Oliver was more interested in industrialism than in finance. ”

“ Nothing but the best will do for Hill. The tallest flagpole that can pass the curves of the mountains between Puget Sound and Saint Paul graces the yard. The kitchen is lined with glazed brick, so that a hose could be turned on the walls; the laundry-room has immense drawers for indoor drying of clothes; no need to open a single window for ventilation, as air from above is forced inside over ice-chambers in Summer and over hot-water pipes in Winter.
Mr. Hill is a rare judge of art, and has the best collection of "Barbizons" in America. ”

“ Every worthy Mæcenas imagines that he is a great painter, writer, sculptor or musician, sidetracked by material cares thrust upon him by unkind Fate. John Jacob Astor once told Washington Irving that it was only business responsibility that prevented his being a novelist; and at other times he declared his intent to take up music as a profession as soon as he had gotten all of his securities properly tied up. ”

“ The father of James J. Hill was a worthy man, with a good hold on the simple virtues, a weak chin and a cosmos of slaty gray.
His only claim to immortality lies in the fact that he was the father of his son. Pneumonia took him, as it often does the physically strong, and he passed out before he had reached his prime. "Death is the most joyfullest thing in life," said Thomas Carlyle to Milburn, the blind preacher, "when it transfers responsibility to those big enough to shoulder it, for that's the only way you can make a man." ”