Success Quote by Andrew Carnegie

Honor, in Carnegie's hands, stops being a noble badge and starts acting like a trap you set for yourself. "All honor's wounds are self-inflicted" flips the usual story: the pain doesn't come from enemies or injustice, but from the internal rules you agree to live by. The line is bluntly transactional, which fits a businessman who understood that reputations are assets and that assets come with liabilities.

The intent is less to sneer at honor than to demystify it. Carnegie suggests that "honor" is not an external force that attacks you; it's a code you choose, and that choice generates its own injuries: pride that won't back down, a refusal to compromise, the stubbornness that makes apologies feel like surrender. The subtext is a warning about moral vanity. People love to frame their suffering as proof of virtue, but Carnegie hints that a lot of that suffering is optional - a consequence of insisting on being seen a certain way.

Context matters. Carnegie rose from immigrant poverty to steel magnate, then tried to launder industrial hard edges into public beneficence through philanthropy. In the Gilded Age, "honor" was a language of status and legitimacy, a way to make ruthless competition look like principle. His aphorism quietly punctures that performance: if your sense of honor keeps cutting you, maybe it's not heroism; maybe it's self-sabotage dressed up as character. It reads like advice from someone who watched powerful men bleed over face-saving codes while the real game - money, leverage, labor - kept moving.