Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie made the largest steel fortune in America and then spent the rest of his life giving it away — libraries, universities, and, after 1898, the cause of international arbitration. He put $1.5 million into the Peace Palace at The Hague in 1903 and founded the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. So the credit is not absurd: this is genuinely the kind of thing he said, and he said a version of it, on the record, at Carnegie Hall in 1907. But his sentence turns on might and right, and it is about war exposing the wrongdoer — not about counting survivors. The right/left pun is a different, later, anonymous line, and Carnegie was dead twelve years before anyone is known to have printed it.