Quotes from Max Weber

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

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

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.

The decisive means for politics is violence.

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.

Either one lives for politics or one lives off politics.

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

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.

Every scientific fulfillment raises new questions; it asks to be surpassed and outdated.

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

One cannot prescribe to anyone whether he should follow an ethic of absolute ends or an ethic of responsibility.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

The Truth is the Truth.