Max Weber's Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.

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

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

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

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.

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.'

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.

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.