David Nasaw Quotes

He [Andrew Carnegie] wanted people to be able to lift themselves, to educate themselves, to train themselves. And there was no better way to do that than with libraries.

In those helter-skelter days of journalism between the Spanish-American War and World War I, the newsies shouting the headlines were as much a part of the urban street scene as the lampposts on every corner.

Buffett, when he gave away his money, referenced Carnegie. He quoted from Carnegie. When he said, "The man who dies rich dies disgraced," in the 1880s, his fellow millionaires looked on him like he was a lunatic, you know, an idiot, a mad man.

The biographer is often asked at the conclusion of his project whether he has grown to like or dislike his subject. The answer of course is both. But the question is misplaced. This biographer's greatest fear was not that he might come to admire or disapprove of his subject, but that he might end up enervated by years of research into another man's life and times. That was, fortunately, never the case. The highest praise I can offer Andrew Carnegie is to profess that, after these many years of research and writing, I find him one of the most fascinating men I have encountered, a man who was many things in his long life, but never boring.