Max Weber Quotes

A government is an institution that holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

The great virtue of bureaucracy - indeed, perhaps its defining characteristic ~ was that it was an institutional method for applying general rules to specific cases, thereby making the actions of government fair and predictable.

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

Charisma is the gift from above where a leader knows from inside himself what to do.

The decisive means for politics is violence.

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

A fully developed bureaucratic mechanism stands in the same relationship to other forms as does the machine to the non-mechanical production of goods. Precision, speed, clarity, documentary ability, continuity, discretion, unity, rigid subordination, reduction of friction and material and personal expenses are unique to bureaucratic organization.

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

The Truth is the Truth.

Either one lives for politics or one lives off politics.

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

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 impulse to acquisition, pursuit of gain, of money, of the greatest possible amount of money, has in itself nothing to do with capitalism. This impulse exists and has existed among waiters, physicians, coachmen, artists, prostitutes, dishonest officials, soldiers, nobles, crusaders, gamblers, and beggars.

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

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the 'disenchantment of the world.' Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental.

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.

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

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.

The nation is burdened with the heavy curse on those who come afterwards. The generation before us was inspired by an activism and a naive enthusiasm, which we cannot rekindle, because we confront tasks of a different kind from those which our fathers faced.