Max Weber Quotes

The intellect, like all cultural values, has created an aristocracy based on the possession of rational culture and independent of all personal ethical qualities of man. The aristocracy of intellect is hence an unbrotherly aristocracy.

~ Max Weber

Weber,... argues that... personal bias should not preclude the scientific ascertainment of objective historical facts.

~ Max Weber

Tolstoi has given the simplest answer, with the words: ‘Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: What shall we do and how shall we live?' That science does not give an answer to this is indisputable. The only question that remains is the sense in which science gives ‘no’ answer, and whether or not science might yet be of use to the one who puts the question correctly.

~ Max Weber

The final result of political action often, no regularly, stands in completely inadequate and often even paradoxical relation to its original meaning.

~ Max Weber

It is certain that there can be no work in political economy on any other than an altruistic basis... If our work is to retain any meaning it can only be informed by this: concern for the future, for those who will come after us.

~ Max Weber

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.

~ Max Weber

... A state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopolyof the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.

~ Max Weber

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

~ Max Weber

Bureaucracy develops the more perfectly, the more it is 'dehumanized', the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation.

~ Max Weber

...Material goods have gained an increasing and finally inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history.

~ Max Weber

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 Weber

... It is immensely moving when a mature man - no matter whether old or young in years - is aware of a responsibility with heart and soul. He then acts by following an ethic of responsibility and somewhere reaches the point where he says: 'Here I stand; I can do no other'. That is something genuinely human and moving. And every one of us who is not spiritually dead must realize the possibility of finding himself at some time in that position. In so far as this is true, an ethic of ultimate ends and an ethic of responsibility are not absolute contrasts but rather supplements, which only in unison constitute a genuine man - a man who can have the 'calling for politics'.

~ 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

... Whenever the man of science introduces his personal value judgment, a full understanding of the facts ceases.

~ Max Weber

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.

~ Max Weber

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.

~ Max Weber

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

~ Max Weber

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.

~ Max Weber

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

~ Max Weber

Politics means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state.

~ 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

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

~ Max Weber

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.

~ Max Weber

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 Weber

Either one lives 'for' politics or one lives 'off' politics.

~ Max Weber

Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.

~ Max Weber