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Who really said it

Watch the costs and the profits take care of themselves

Not Andrew Carnegie’s wording — an unsourced motto Andrew Carnegie 1835–1919 · Scottish-American steel magnate and philanthropist
Disputed Rights unconfirmed

The idea is unmistakably Carnegie’s — he built Carnegie Steel on knowing the cost of every process, and said so in his own memoir — but the sentence is not. It appears in neither his Autobiography nor The Empire of Business, Wikiquote files it under “Undated” with nothing behind it but a link to a PBS documentary page, and the earliest printings anyone has documented are anonymous American trade-journal wordings from 1913 and an engineering firm’s advertisement from 1921.

Last verified 17 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed wording — copy with the correction

“Watch the costs and the profits take care of themselves” routinely credited to Andrew Carnegie, but no Carnegie book, speech or letter contains it. Wikiquote lists it as undated, sourced only to a PBS documentary page, and the earliest printings documented by Barry Popik are anonymous American trade-press wordings: Domestic Engineering, 17 May 1913, and an L. V. Estes, Inc. advertisement in Industrial Management, 1 June 1921. Carnegie's cost obsession is real and documented in chapter 10 of his 1920 Autobiography; the slogan is not his sentence. Via Quotle.info.

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We couldn’t establish where this was first published, so there’s no rights status to give. Credit it as shown above — just don’t present it as public domain, and get permission for commercial or published reuse.

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Provenance

What the record actually holds

Quote status
No source has been found in any Carnegie book, speech, letter or interview
Documented printings
American trade journals, a corporate booklet and an advertisement, 1911–1923 (chronology by Barry Popik)
Closest Carnegie text
Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie (1920), chap. 10, “The Iron Works”
Attribution trail
PBS American Experience → Wikiquote (“Undated”) → quotation sites

As I became acquainted with the manufacture of iron I was greatly surprised to find that the cost of each of the various processes was unknown. … I felt as if we were moles burrowing in the dark, and this to me was intolerable. I insisted upon such a system of weighing and accounting being introduced throughout our works as would enable us to know what our cost was for each process and especially what each man was doing, who saved material, who wasted it, and who produced the best results. Abridged

This is not the quote. It is the closest documented thing Carnegie actually wrote on the subject — from chapter 10 of his posthumous Autobiography — and it is offered here to show what the record does contain, and what it does not.

Barry Popik: dated chronology of the saying

How we verified this

  • Wikiquote files the line in its Undated ↗ section, and the only citation beneath it is a bare link to a PBS page — the standard signature of a quotation for which no document has ever been produced.
  • That bare link points at the American Experience film-transcript page — a legacy URL that is now dead and redirects to the programme’s homepage. The same motto appears, equally uncited, on the American Experience biography of Carnegie ↗, which says he “managed by the motto ‘watch costs, and the profits take care of themselves’” — a documentary’s summary sentence, with no source given for the motto.
  • Barry Popik’s dated citations ↗ find the wording in the trade press rather than in Carnegie: Domestic Engineering for 17 May 1913 (“Take care of the costs and the profits will take care of themselves”), and all but the exact wording as an L. V. Estes, Incorporated advertisement in Industrial Management for 1 June 1921, whose display type reads “Watch the Costs the Profits Take Care of Themselves” — no “and” — repeated in that form in Management Engineering for 1922–1923.
  • Carnegie’s own volumes come up empty. Neither the Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie ↗ (1920) nor The Empire of Business ↗ (1902), his collection of business advice, contains “watch the costs” or “take care of themselves” anywhere in its text.

No rights status can honestly be asserted for the quotation, because no one has identified the work it first appeared in. The passage excerpted above is a different matter: the Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie was published in 1920 and is in the public domain in the United States, which is why Project Gutenberg carries it in full.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

The attribution, taken apart

This is a slogan in search of a speaker. Every step of its chain of custody points at a documentary blurb rather than a document.

Andrew Carnegie unsourced

Wikiquote lists it under Undated ↗ — quotes it cannot tie to a dated work — and the citation attached is a bare link to a PBS documentary page, not to anything Carnegie wrote or said.

PBS American Experience (and the quote sites downstream of it) uncited

The American Experience biography ↗ states that Carnegie “managed by the motto ‘watch costs, and the profits take care of themselves’” and gives no source; the quotation sites repeat it with a tidier wording and quotation marks.

The American trade press, and an engineering firm’s copywriter 1913–1921

Barry Popik’s chronology ↗ has Domestic Engineering printing “Take care of the costs and the profits will take care of themselves” on 17 May 1913 as its own maxim, and all but the exact wording — “Watch the Costs the Profits Take Care of Themselves,” without the “and” — running as display type in an advertisement for L. V. Estes, Incorporated, industrial engineers, in Industrial Management on 1 June 1921. Neither mentions Carnegie, and the 1921 advertisement appeared after his death in August 1919.

An older English proverb ancestor

The pattern is the pence-and-pounds proverb rebuilt for managers. Carnegie quotes the original in An American Four-in-Hand in Britain ↗ — “Take care of your pence and the pounds will take care of themselves” — crediting it there to Franklin.

The substance is genuinely his: in chapter 10 of his Autobiography ↗ Carnegie describes an iron trade that did not know its own costs and says he felt “as if we were moles burrowing in the dark” until he imposed a system of weighing and accounting. The slogan is a fair summary of that conviction — it simply is not a sentence anyone can show he uttered.

Context

Why it sticks to him anyway

Carnegie really did run on costs. In chapter 10 of his Autobiography he describes discovering that the Pittsburgh iron trade had no idea what any of its processes cost — owners learned whether they had made money only when the books were balanced at year’s end — and says he found it intolerable, “as if we were moles burrowing in the dark.” He forced scales and clerks into the works until he knew the cost of every process and the output of every man. A one-line slogan compresses that whole programme neatly, which is most of why it travels under his name.

The phrasing also rides an older rhythm. “Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves” was a stock English proverb, and Carnegie printed a version of it himself in An American Four-in-Hand in Britain ↗, where his mother offers “Take care of your pence and the pounds will take care of themselves” as one of Franklin’s wisest proverbs. Swap pence for costs and pounds for profits and you have the management version — which is roughly what the American trade press did in the 1910s and 1920s, without crediting anybody.

I felt as if we were moles burrowing in the dark.

What the dated citations actually show

Barry Popik’s chronology runs from 1911 to 1923 and never lands on Carnegie. A 1911 Burroughs Adding Machine booklet has “profits will take care of themselves when he has taken care of the losses”; Domestic Engineering ran the near-exact form on 17 May 1913; The Business of Trading in Stocks (1917) applies it to losses rather than costs.

The closest wording to the one quoted today appears in his chronology as display type in an advertisement — “Watch the Costs the Profits Take Care of Themselves,” without the “and”: Industrial Management, 1 June 1921, page 19, for L. V. Estes, Incorporated, industrial engineers — printed after Carnegie’s death in August 1919 — and again in Management Engineering for 1922–1923. Popik marks the entry “in progress,” so earlier printings may yet turn up; what has not turned up is a Carnegie source.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Work Wisdom Success

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Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Barry Popik: dated citations for the sayingbarrypopik.com

The only dated chronology of this wording, running 1911–1923 — trade journals, a corporate booklet and an advertisement, none of them Carnegie.
Wikiquote: Andrew Carnegieen.wikiquote.org

Carries the line in its “Undated” section with no citation except a bare link to PBS.
PBS American Experience: Carnegie biographywww.pbs.org

The page that calls it his motto, offering no citation of its own. Wikiquote’s own footnote points at the American Experience film transcript, a now-dead URL.
Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie (1920), full textwww.gutenberg.org

Searchable text of the memoir; the cost-accounting passage is in chapter 10, and the slogan is nowhere in the book.
The Empire of Business (1902), full textarchive.org

Carnegie’s own volume of business advice — the likeliest home for such a maxim, and it is not there.
An American Four-in-Hand in Britain, full textwww.gutenberg.org

Where Carnegie does print the ancestor proverb: “Take care of your pence and the pounds will take care of themselves.”

The man it is pinned on

About Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie

1835–1919 · Scottish-American steel magnate and philanthropist

Carnegie emigrated from Dunfermline as a boy, rose through the telegraph office and the Pennsylvania Railroad, and turned Pittsburgh iron and steel into the largest such enterprise in the world before selling out in 1901 and giving the proceeds away. What made the mills formidable was not invention but measurement: he forced a weighing-and-accounting system on works whose owners, by his own account, did not know what any single process cost. That obsession is documented in his own words — which is precisely why a slogan he never wrote sticks to him so easily.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

How to cite this page

No primary source is known. Earliest printings documented in Barry Popik, “Watch the costs and the profits will take care of themselves,” barrypopik.com, January 14, 2011, citing Domestic Engineering, May 17, 1913, p. 179, and an L. V. Estes, Inc. advertisement in Industrial Management, June 1, 1921, p. 19. Cf. Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie, ed. John C. Van Dyke (London: Constable & Co., 1920), chap. 10, “The Iron Works.”

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Watch the costs and the profits take care of themselves’?” Last verified 17 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/watch-the-costs-and-the-profits-take-care-of-themselves/

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