Top 94 Quotes About Max Weber
#1. In an analogy that would prove all too apt, Max Weber likened the city to a human being with his skin removed.
Erik Larson
#2. As Max Weber long ago pointed out, once one sets up a genuinely effective bureaucracy, it's almost impossible to get rid of it.
David Graeber
#3. If, as Max Weber contended, science, modernity and rationalism have disenchanted the world and swept it clean of gods, spirits and magic (or, at least, problematised believing in them), then psychedelics offer a potential way out of the ensuing existential impasse. -Andy Letcher
Cameron Adams
#4. Power, as Max Weber wrote, is the ability to make others do what you want them to do and what they wouldn't do otherwise.
Richard Lachmann
#5. Who killed Christianity in Europe? Was it, as (Max) Weber himself predicted, that the spirit of capitalism was bound to destroy the Protestant ethic parents, as materialism corrupted the original aestheticism of the godly?
Niall Ferguson
#6. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.
Clifford Geertz
#7. Its entry on the scene was not generally peaceful. A flood of mistrust, sometimes of hatred, above all of moral indignation, regularly opposed itself to the first innovator.
Max Weber
#8. Wesley's anti-Calvinistic faction within the movement with its doctrine that grace could be lost. The
Max Weber
#9. No sociologist, for instance, 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#13. 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
#14. All knowledge of cultural reality, as may be seen, is always knowledge from particular points of view.
Max Weber
#15. The ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility are not opposites. They are complementary to one another.
Max Weber
#16. The summum bonum of this [Puritan] ethic is the earning of more and more money combined with the strict avoidance of all enjoyment.
Max Weber
#17. Beware of thinking all your own that you possess, and of living accordingly. It is a mistake that many people who have credit fall into.
Max Weber
#18. That in East Prussia Frederick William I tolerated the Mennonites as indispensable to industry,
Max Weber
#19. Loss of time through sociability, idle talk, luxury, even more sleep than is necessary for health, six to at most eight hours, is worthy of absolute moral condemnation. It
Max Weber
#20. 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.
Max Weber
#21. Weber,... argues that... personal bias should not preclude the scientific ascertainment of objective historical facts.
Max Weber
#22. Only on the assumption of belief in the validity of values is the attempt to espouse value-judgments meaningful. However, to judge the validity of such values is a matter of faith .
Max Weber
#23. Puritanism carried the ethos of the rational organization of capital and labor. It took over from the Jewish ethic only what was adapted to this purpose.
Max Weber
#24. Within the confines of the lecture hall, no other virtue exists but plain intellectual integrity.
Max Weber
#25. 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
#26. Weber's achievement was not to definitively answer a riddle but to stake out a territory fertile of new puzzles at the heart of which is the claim that religious forces, not simply economic ones, paved the way for the mentality characteristic of modern, Western capitalism.
Max Weber
#27. But at least one thing was unquestionably new: the valuation of the fulfillment of duty in worldly affairs as the highest form which the moral activity of the individual could assume. This
Max Weber
#28. A highly developed stock exchange cannot be a club for the cult of ethics.
Max Weber
#29. Daily and hourly, the politician inwardly has to overcome a quite trivial and all-too-human enemy: a quite vulgar vanity.
Max Weber
#30. Not everyone realises that to write a really good piece of journalism is at least as demanding intellectually as the achievement of any scholar.
Max Weber
#31. 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
#32. One cannot with impunity try to transfer this task entirely to mechanical assistants if one wishes to figure something, even though the final result is often small indeed.
Max Weber
#33. It is not true that good can follow only from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true. Anyone who fails to see this is, indeed, a political infant.
Max Weber
#34. Especially begging, on the part of one able to work, is not only the sin of slothfulness, but a violation of the duty of brotherly love according to the Apostle's own word.
Max Weber
#35. Whenever known and sufficient causes are available, it is anti-scientific to discard them in favour of a hypothesis that can never be verified.
Max Weber
#36. 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
#37. In practice this means that God helps those who help themselves . Thus
Max Weber
#38. In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the "saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment".114 But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.
Max Weber
#39. The ability of mental concentration, as well as the absolutely essential feeling of obligation to one's job, are here most often combined with a strict economy which calculates the possibility of high earnings, and a cool self-control and frugality which enormously increase performance.
Max Weber
#40. Charisma is the gift from above where a leader knows from inside himself what to do.
Max Weber
#41. He must be stilled in order to create that deep repose of the soul in which alone the word of God can be heard. Of
Max Weber
#42. Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings (Prov. xxii. 29).
Max Weber
#43. Man does not by nature wish to earn more and more money.
Max Weber
#44. Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.
Max Weber
#45. The process of sanctifying life could thus almost take on the character of a business enterprise.
Max Weber
#46. The decisive means for politics is violence.
Max Weber
#47. Impulsive enjoyment of life, which leads away both from work in a calling and from religion, was as such the enemy of rational asceticism, whether in the form of seigneurial sports, or the enjoyment of the dance-hall or the public - house of the common man.
Max Weber
#48. Calvinism, in comparison, appears to be more closely related to the hard legalism and the active enterprise of bourgeois-capitalistic entrepreneurs. Finally,
Max Weber
#49. The conceptions of idle talk, of superfluities, and of vain ostentation, all designations of an irrational attitude without objective purpose, thus
Max Weber
#50. Nothing is worthy of man as man unless he can pursue it with passionate devotion.
Max Weber
#51. The fully developed bureaucratic apparatus compares with other organisations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of production.
Max Weber
#52. 'Culture' is a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of the world process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning and significance.
Max Weber
#53. The earning of money within the modern economic order is, so long as it is done legally, the result and the expression of virtue and proficiency in a calling; and this virtue and proficiency are, as it is now not difficult to see,
Max Weber
#54. For bourgeois classes as such have seldom before and never since displayed heroism. It was "the last of our heroisms", as Carlyle, not without reason, has said.
Max Weber
#55. However many people complain about the "red tape," it would be sheer illusion to think ... continuous administrative work can be carried out in any field except by means of officials working in offices ... The choice is only that between bureaucracy and dillettantism.
Max Weber
#56. 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.
Max Weber
#57. 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
#58. The ultimately possible attitudes toward life are irreconcilable, and hence their struggle can never be brought to a final conclusion.
Max Weber
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. spirit of capitalism is best understood as part of the development of rationalism as a whole,
Max Weber
#62. ...Material goods have gained an increasing and finally inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history.
Max Weber
#63. The final result of political action often, no regularly, stands in completely inadequate and often even paradoxical relation to its original meaning.
Max Weber
#64. The experience of the irrationality of the world has been the driving force of all religious revolution.
Max Weber
#65. Laws are important and valuable in the exact natural sciences, in the measure that those sciences are universally valid.
Max Weber
#66. 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.'
Max Weber
#67. 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.
Max Weber
#68. Every type of purely direct concrete description bears the mark of artistic portrayal.
Max Weber
#69. One can say that three pre-eminent qualities are decisive for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion.
Max Weber
#70. 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.
Max Weber
#71. The radical elimination of magic from the world allowed no other psychological course than the practice of worldly asceticism. Since
Max Weber
#72. The only way of living acceptably to God was not to surpass worldly morality in monastic asceticism, but solely through the fulfillment of the obligations imposed upon the individual by his position in the world. That was his calling.
Max Weber
#73. One may attain salvation in any walk of life; on
Max Weber
#74. All theology represents an intellectual rationalization of the possession of sacred values... Every theology... presupposes that the world must have a meaning, and the question is how to interpret this meaning so that it is intellectually conceivable.
Max Weber
#75. Causal analysis provides absolutely no value judgment, and a value judgment is absolutely not a causal explanation.
Max Weber
#76. Rational conduct on the basis of the idea of calling, was born... from the spirit of Christian asceticism.
Max Weber
#77. After industry and frugality, nothing contributes more to the raising of a young man in the world than punctuality and justice in all his dealings;
Max Weber
#78. Wealth is thus bad ethically only in so far as it is a temptation to idleness and sinful enjoyment of life, and its acquisition is bad only when it is with the purpose of later living merrily and without care. But
Max Weber
#79. 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.
Max Weber
#80. Ideas come when we do not expect them, and not when we are brooding and searching at our desks. Yet ideas would certainly not come to mind had we not brooded at our desks and searched for answers with passionate devotion.
Max Weber
#81. The organization of ofices follows the principle of hierarchy ... each lower office is under the control and supervision of a higher one
Max Weber
#82. 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.
Max Weber
#83. Calvinist believers were psychologically isolated. Their distance from God could only be precariously bridged, and their inner tensions only partially relieved, by unstinting, purposeful labor.
Max Weber
#84. One cannot prescribe to anyone whether he should follow an ethic of absolute ends or an ethic of responsibility.
Max Weber
#85. 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
#86. Either one lives 'for' politics or one lives 'off' politics.
Max Weber
#87. ... Whenever the man of science introduces his personal value judgment, a full understanding of the facts ceases.
Max Weber
#88. Every scientific fulfillment raises new questions; it asks to be surpassed and outdated.
Max Weber
#89. The purely emotional form of Pietism is, as Ritschl has pointed out, a religious dilettantism for the leisure class.
Max Weber
#90. 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.
Max Weber
#91. 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
#92. The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.
Max Weber
#93. A government is an institution that holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.
Max Weber
#94. 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
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