Quotes from 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.

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

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.

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

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

Nothing is worthy of man as man unless he can pursue it with passionate devotion.

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

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.

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

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

Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Rational conduct on the basis of the idea of calling, was born... from the spirit of Christian asceticism.

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

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

Charisma knows only inner determination and inner restraint…. The charismatic leader gains and maintains authority solely by proving his strength in life.

Every scientific fulfillment raises new questions; it asks to be surpassed and outdated.

The radical elimination of magic from the world allowed no other psychological course than the practice of worldly asceticism. Since