Max Weber Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“The decisive means for politics is violence.”
-- Max WeberSource : Max Weber (2009). “From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology”, p.121, Routledge
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“The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.”
-- Max WeberSource : Max Weber (2013). “From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology”, p.155, Routledge
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“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 WeberSource : Max Weber (2009). “From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology”, p.128, Routledge
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“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 -
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“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 WeberSource : Max Weber (2009). “From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology”, p.42, Routledge
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“The purely emotional form of Pietism is, as Ritschl has pointed out, a religious dilettantism for the leisure class.”
-- Max Weber -
“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 -
“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 -
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“The fully developed bureaucratic apparatus compares with other organisations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of production.”
-- Max Weber -
“The experience of the irrationality of the world has been the driving force of all religious revolution.”
-- Max Weber -
“The organization of ofices follows the principle of hierarchy ... each lower office is under the control and supervision of a higher one”
-- Max Weber -
“Daily and hourly, the politician inwardly has to overcome a quite trivial and all-too-human enemy: a quite vulgar vanity.”
-- Max Weber -
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“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 -
“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 WeberSource : 1904-5 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (translated by Talcott Parsons,1930).
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“Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.”
-- Max Weber -
“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 -
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“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”
-- Max WeberSource : Max Weber (2012). “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”, p.182, Courier Corporation
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“A government is an institution that holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.”
-- Max Weber -
“[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 -
“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 -
“Every scientific fulfillment raises new questions; it asks to be surpassed and outdated.”
-- Max WeberSource : Max Weber (1968). “On Charisma and Institution Building”, p.298, University of Chicago Press
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“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
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“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 -
“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
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