Max Weber famous quotes

The decisive means for politics is violence.
-- Max Weber

#Military #Mean #Violence

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

#Fate #World #Disenchantment

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.
-- Max Weber

#Men #Historical #Impossible

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the 'disenchantment of the world.' Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental.
-- Max Weber

#Art #Fate #Historical

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.
-- Max Weber

#Party #People #Leader

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

#Religious #Emotional #Class

The fate of an epoch that has eaten of the tree of knowledge is that it must...recognize that general views of life and the universe can never be the products of increasing empirical knowledge, and that the highest ideals, which move us most forcefully, are always formed only in the struggle with other ideals which are just as sacred to others as ours are to us.
-- Max Weber

#Struggle #Moving #Fate

In the midst of a culture that is rationally organized for a vocational workaday life, there is hardly any room for the cultivation of acosmic brotherliness, unless it is among strata who are economically carefree. Under the technical and social conditions of rational culture, an imitation of the life of Buddha, Jesus, or Francis seems condemned to failure for purely external reasons.
-- Max Weber

#Jesus #Culture #Rooms

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

#Machines #Doe #Compare

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

#Religious #Revolution #World

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

#Organization #Office #Hierarchy

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

#Reality #Vanity #Enemy

Capitalism may even be identical with the restraint, or at least a rational tempering, of this irrational impulse. But capitalism is identical with the restraint, or at least a rational tempering, of this irrational impulse. But capitalism is identical with the pursuit of profit, and forever renewed profit, by means of continuous, rational, capitalistic enterprise.
-- Max Weber

#Mean #Forever #May

The impulse to acquisition, pursuit of gain, of money, of the greatest possible amount of money, has in itself nothing to do with capitalism. This impulse exists and has existed among waiters, physicians, coachmen, artists, prostitutes, dishonest officials, soldiers, nobles, crusaders, gamblers, and beggars.
-- Max Weber

#Artist #Soldier #Acquisition

Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.
-- Max Weber

#Strong #Boards #Boring

Only by strict specialization can the scientific worker become fully conscious, for once and perhaps never again in his lifetime, that he has achieved something that will endure. A really definitive and good accomplishment is today always a specialized act.
-- Max Weber

#Accomplishment #Today #Lifetime

All research in the cultural sciences in an age of specialization, once it is oriented towards a given subject matter through particular settings of problems and has established its methodological principles, will consider the analysis of the data as an end in itself.
-- Max Weber

#Data #Age #Analysis

Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs - these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic administration.
-- Max Weber

#Unity #Cost #Administration

It is true that the path of human destiny cannot but appal him who surveys a section of it. But he will do well to keep his small personal commentarie to himself, as one does at the sight of the sea or of majestic mountains, unless he knows himself to be called and gifted to give them expression in artistic or prophetic form. In most other cases, the voluminous talk about intuition does nothing but conceal a lack of perspective toward the object, which merits the same judgement as a similar lack of perspective toward men.
-- Max Weber

#Destiny #Men #Sight

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

#Heart #Civilization #Levels

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

#Government #Use #Politics

[In] the realm of science, ... what we have achieved will be obsolete in ten, twenty or fifty years. That is the fate, indeed, that is the very meaning of scientific work. ... Every scientific "fulfillment" raises new "questions" and cries out to be surpassed rendered obsolete. Everyone who wishes to serve science has to resign himself to this.
-- Max Weber

#Hard Work #Fate #Years

However many people complain about the "red tape," it would be sheer illusion to think ... continuous administrative work can be carried out in any field except by means of officials working in offices.... The choice is only that between bureaucracy and dillettantism.
-- Max Weber

#Mean #Thinking #People

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

#Science #Fulfillment #Questioning

Ideas come when we do not expect them, and not when we are brooding and searching at our desks. Yet ideas would certainly not come to mind had we not brooded at our desks and searched for answers with passionate devotion.
-- Max Weber

#Writing #Ideas #Mind

Social economic problems do not exist everywhere that an economic event plays a role as cause or effect - since problems arise only where the significance of those factors is problematical and can be precisely determined only through the application of methods of social-economics.
-- Max Weber

#Play #Events #Roles

It is not astonishing that there are many journalists who have become human failures and worthless men. Rather, it is astonishing that, despite all this, this very stratum includes such a great number of valuable and quite genuine men, a fact that outsiders would not so easily guess.
-- Max Weber

#Men #Numbers #Outsiders

All the analysis of infinite reality which the finite human mind can conduct rests on the tacit assumption that only a finite portion of this reality constitutes the object of scientific investigation, and that only it is 'important' in the sense of being 'worthy of being known.
-- Max Weber

#Reality #Mind #Important

The capacity for the accomplishment of religious virtuosos the "intellectual sacrifice" is the decisive characteristic of the positively religious man. That this is so is shown by the fact that in spite of (or rather in consequence) of theology (which unveils it) the tension between the value-spheres of "science" and the sphere of "the holy" is unbridgeable.
-- Max Weber

#Religious #Sacrifice #Men

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 .
-- Max Weber

#Meaningful #Judging #Matter

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

#Integrity #Intellectual #Lectures

The Truth is the Truth.
-- Max Weber

#Truth Is

A fully developed bureaucratic mechanism stands in the same relationship to other forms as does the machine to the non-mechanical production of goods. Precision, speed, clarity, documentary ability, continuity, discretion, unity, rigid subordination, reduction of friction and material and personal expenses are unique to bureaucratic organization.
-- Max Weber

#Unique #Organization #Unity

Max Weber and Vladimir Lenin say, in almost identical words, that with regard to the use of force the state is always a dictatorship.
-- Max Weber

#Max #Use #Weber

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

#Clubs #Ethics #Cult

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

#Favour #Causes #Hypothesis

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

#Mean #Groups #Influence

The so-called materialistic conception of history, with the crude elements of genius of the early form which appeared, for instance, in the Communist Manifesto, still prevails only in the minds of laymen and dilettantes.
-- Max Weber

#Mind #Genius #Elements

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

#Responsibility #Opposites #Ethics

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

#Integrity #Chance #Social

The career of politics grants a feeling of power. The knowledge of influencing men, of participating in power over them, and above all, the feeling of holding in one's hands a nerve fiber of historically important events can elevate the professional politician above everyday routine even when he is placed in formally modest positions.
-- Max Weber

#Men #Hands #Careers

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

#Responsibility #Passion #Feelings

Those human groups that entertain a subjective belief in their common descent because of similarities of physical type or of customs or both, or because of memories of colonization and migration; this belief must be important for group formation; furthermore it does not matter whether an objective blood relationship exists.
-- Max Weber

#Memories #Blood #Important

Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he will not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say In spite of all! has the calling for politics.
-- Max Weber

#Stupid #Views #Calling

The term 'charisma' will be applied to a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a 'leader.
-- Max Weber

#Personality #Leader #Quality

For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.
-- Max Weber

#Cells #Order #Everyday

Either one lives for politics or one lives off politics.
-- Max Weber

The nation is burdened with the heavy curse on those who come afterwards. The generation before us was inspired by an activism and a naive enthusiasm, which we cannot rekindle, because we confront tasks of a different kind from those which our fathers faced.
-- Max Weber

#Father #Tasks #Generations

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.
-- Max Weber

#Trying #Wish #Tasks

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.
-- Max Weber

#Teacher #Party #Mean

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

#Reality #Views #May

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

#Analysis #Judgment #Explanation

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

#World #Infinity #Culture

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

#Bears #Artistic #Type

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

#Opposites #Evil #Good And Evil

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

#Law #Important #Natural

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

#Writing #Achievement #Pieces

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.
-- Max Weber

#Thinking #Age #Months