Max Weber Quotes

In a democracy the people choose a leader in whom they trust. Then the chosen leader says, 'Now shut up and obey me.' People and party are then no longer free to interfere in his business.

The decisive means for politics is violence.

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.

A government is an institution that holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.

Politics means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state.

Nothing is worthy of man as man unless he can pursue it with passionate devotion.

All knowledge of cultural reality, as may be seen, is always knowledge from particular points of view.

Power is the chance to impose your will within a social context, even when opposed and regardless of the integrity of that chance.

It is not true that good can follow only from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true.

Man does not by nature wish to earn more and more money.

The fully developed bureaucratic apparatus compares with other organisations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of production.

The experience of the irrationality of the world has been the driving force of all religious revolution.

Either one lives for politics or one lives off politics.

No sociologist should think himself too good, even in his old age, to make tens of thousands of quite trivial computations in his head and perhaps for months at a time.

Culture' is a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of the world process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning and significance.

Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth - that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible.

Every scientific fulfillment raises new questions; it asks to be surpassed and outdated.

Charisma is the gift from above where a leader knows from inside himself what to do.

specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.

Not everyone realises that to write a really good piece of journalism is at least as demanding intellectually as the achievement of any scholar.

The primary task of a useful teacher is to teach his students to recognize 'inconvenient' facts - I mean facts that are inconvenient for their party opinions.

The Truth is the Truth.

Whenever known and sufficient causes are available, it is anti-scientific to discard them in favour of a hypothesis that can never be verified.

The organization of ofices follows the principle of hierarchy ... each lower office is under the control and supervision of a higher one

The purely emotional form of Pietism is, as Ritschl has pointed out, a religious dilettantism for the leisure class.

Causal analysis provides absolutely no value judgment, and a value judgment is absolutely not a causal explanation.

Within the confines of the lecture hall, no other virtue exists but plain intellectual integrity.

Puritanism carried the ethos of the rational organization of capital and labor. It took over from the Jewish ethic only what was adapted to this purpose.

The ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility are not opposites. They are complementary to one another.

Daily and hourly, the politician inwardly has to overcome a quite trivial and all-too-human enemy: a quite vulgar vanity.

Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.

A highly developed stock exchange cannot be a club for the cult of ethics.

The summum bonum of this [Puritan] ethic is the earning of more and more money combined with the strict avoidance of all enjoyment.

One can say that three pre-eminent qualities are decisive for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion.

Only on the assumption of belief in the validity of values is the attempt to espouse value-judgments meaningful. However, to judge the validity of such values is a matter of faith .

One cannot with impunity try to transfer this task entirely to mechanical assistants if one wishes to figure something, even though the final result is often small indeed.

Every type of purely direct concrete description bears the mark of artistic portrayal.

Laws are important and valuable in the exact natural sciences, in the measure that those sciences are universally valid.

Either one lives 'for' politics or one lives 'off' politics.

It is not true that good can only follow from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true.

... Whenever the man of science introduces his personal value judgment, a full understanding of the facts ceases.

...Material goods have gained an increasing and finally inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history.

Rational conduct on the basis of the idea of calling, was born... from the spirit of Christian asceticism.

... A state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopolyof the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.

As intellectualism suppresses belief in magic, the world's processes become disenchanted, lose the magical significance, and henceforth simply 'are' and 'happen' but no longer signify anything.

[Art] acts as 'an instrument allowing us to see through the gaps of dominant ideologies, and the source from which new methods could be drawn in the struggle against the system(s)'.

The final result of political action often, no regularly, stands in completely inadequate and often even paradoxical relation to its original meaning.

Weber, ... argues that... personal bias should not preclude the scientific ascertainment of objective historical facts.