Max Weber Quotes
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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.'
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'Culture' is a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of the world process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning and significance.
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Whenever known and sufficient causes are available, it is anti-scientific to discard them in favour of a hypothesis that can never be verified.
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The ultimately possible attitudes toward life are irreconcilable, and hence their struggle can never be brought to a final conclusion.
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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.
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A highly developed stock exchange cannot be a club for the cult of ethics.
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Every type of purely direct concrete description bears the mark of artistic portrayal.
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Politics means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state.
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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.
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Either one lives 'for' politics or one lives 'off' politics.
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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.
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Homelessness is the fundamental idea of salvation in Jainism. It means the breaking off of all earthly relations, and therefore, above all, indifference to general impressions and avoidance of all worldly motives, the ceasing to act, to hope, to desire.
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'Rationalism' is a historical concept that contains within itself a world of contradictions.
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Luther understands monasticism as a product of an egoistic lovelessness that withdraws from one's duties in the world. By contrast, this-worldly work in a vocation appears to him to be a visible expression of brotherly love, a notion he anchors in a highly unrealistic manner indeed and in contrast-almost grotesquely-to the well-known passages of Adam Smith.
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Laws are important and valuable in the exact natural sciences, in the measure that those sciences are universally valid.
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All knowledge of cultural reality, as may be seen, is always knowledge from particular points of view.
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One can say that three pre-eminent qualities are decisive for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion.
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The capacity to distinguish between empirical knowledge and value-judgments, and the fulfillment of the scientific duty to see the factual truth as well as the practical duty to stand up for our own ideals constitute the program to which we wish to adhere with ever increasing firmness.
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Within the confines of the lecture hall, no other virtue exists but plain intellectual integrity.
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The modern view of criminal justice, broadly, is that public concern with morality or expediency decrees expiation for the violation of a norm; this concern finds expression in the infliction of punishment on the evil doer by agents of the state, the evil doer, however, enjoying the protection of a regular procedure.
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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.
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Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.