Success Quote by Andrew Carnegie

Power, Carnegie implies, isn’t the granite refusal to bend; it’s the nerve to bend on purpose. Coming from a titan who built an empire out of consolidation, labor discipline, and hard-nosed negotiation, the line doubles as self-justification and instruction manual. He’s trying to flip the Victorian moral script: “strong men” aren’t the pious martyrs of principle, they’re the operators who trade principles like chips when the table demands it.

The phrasing is a quiet act of reputational engineering. “Conversely” positions him against a straw-man ethic of purity, as if compromise is the grown-up alternative to childish rigidity. Then comes the provocation: “all principles can be compromised.” Not some, not most-all. That absolutism is doing work. It sanitizes flexibility by elevating it into a meta-virtue: compromise becomes the “greater principle” that outranks every other principle. It’s a neat rhetorical move that turns moral concession into moral achievement.

Context matters: Carnegie’s world was the Gilded Age, where capital presented itself as modernity’s engine and moral language was often used to launder brute economic outcomes. This quote carries that era’s managerial confidence: if the goal is “greater,” the means can be negotiated. It’s also a preemptive defense against criticism-from labor, from reformers, from anyone who thought certain lines shouldn’t be crossed. Carnegie is arguing that the real sin isn’t compromise; it’s lacking the authority to declare which principle is “greater” in the first place.