Max Weber Quotes
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Power is the chance to impose your will within a social context, even when opposed and regardless of the integrity of that chance.
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Above all, as will be repeatedly apparent in the sections below, fundamental for our discussion is the investigation of the idea of a testifying to one's belief as the psychological point of origin for methodical ethics.
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Causal analysis provides absolutely no value judgment, and a value judgment is absolutely not a causal explanation.
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It is not true that good can only follow from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.
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Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he shall not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Not everyone realises that to write a really good piece of journalism is at least as demanding intellectually as the achievement of any scholar.
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One cannot prescribe to anyone whether he should follow an ethic of absolute ends or an ethic of responsibility.
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What interests us here is the assimilative power of the Hindu life order due to its legitimation of social rank.
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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.
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The Truth is the Truth.
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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.
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The ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility are not opposites. They are complementary to one another.
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Modern capitalism has as little use for liberum arbitrium undisciplined persons as laborers as it has for the businessman fully without scruples in the running of his company.
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Persecutions of these heterodoxies ... do not account for the unusually quick victory of Hinduism. Favorable political circumstances contributed to the victory. Decisive, however, was the fact that Hinduism could provide an incomparable religious support for the legitimation interest of the ruling strata.
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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.
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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.
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The more a religion is aware of its opposition in principle to economic rationalization as such, the more apt are the religion’s virtuosi to reject the world, especially its economic activities.