Max Weber Quotes

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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 Quotes: All research in the cultural
Calvinism, in comparison, appears to be more closely related to the hard legalism and the active enterprise of bourgeois-capitalistic entrepreneurs. Finally,
Max Weber Quotes: Calvinism, in comparison, appears to
The fate of an epoch that has eaten of the tree of knowledge is that it must ... recognize that general views of life and the universe can never be the products of increasing empirical knowledge, and that the highest ideals, which move us most forcefully, are always formed only in the struggle with other ideals which are just as sacred to others as ours are to us.
Max Weber Quotes: The fate of an epoch
Low wages fail even from a purely business point of view wherever it is a question of producing goods which require any sort of skilled labour, or the use of expensive machinery which is easily damaged, or in general wherever any great amount of sharp attention or of initiative is required. Here low wages do not pay, and their effect is the opposite of what was intended. For not only is a developed sense of responsibility absolutely indispensable, but in general also an attitude which, at least during working hours, is freed from continual calculations of how the customary wage may be earned with a maximum of comfort and a minimum of exertion. Labour must, on the contrary, be performed as if it were an absolute end in itself, a calling. But such an attitude is by no means a product of nature. It cannot be evoked by low wages or high ones alone, but can only be the product of a long and arduous process of education.
Max Weber Quotes: Low wages fail even from
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 Quotes: The nation is burdened with
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 Quotes: The earning of money within
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 Quotes: Only by strict specialization can
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 Quotes: Bureaucracy develops the more perfectly,
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 Quotes: All theology represents an intellectual
Either one lives 'for' politics or one lives 'off' politics.
Max Weber Quotes: Either one lives 'for' politics
In fact, the summum bonum of his ethic, the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life, is above all completely devoid of any eudaemonistic, not to say hedonistic, admixture. It is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that from the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, it appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational. Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. This reversal of what we should call the natural relationship, so irrational from a naive point of view, is evidently as definitely a leading principle of capitalism as it is foreign to all peoples not under capitalistic influence.
Max Weber Quotes: In fact, the summum bonum
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 Quotes: The so-called 'materialistic conception of
The capacity for the accomplishment of religious virtuosos the "intellectual sacrifice" is the decisive characteristic of the positively religious man. That this is so is shown by the fact that in spite of (or rather in consequence) of theology (which unveils it) the tension between the value-spheres of "science" and the sphere of "the holy" is unbridgeable.
Max Weber Quotes: The capacity for the accomplishment
The radical elimination of magic from the world allowed no other psychological course than the practice of worldly asceticism. Since
Max Weber Quotes: The radical elimination of magic
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 Quotes: No sociologist, for instance, should
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 Quotes: Power is the chance to
The term 'charisma' will be applied to a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a 'leader.
Max Weber Quotes: The term 'charisma' will be
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 Quotes: In a democracy the people
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 Quotes: Loss of time through sociability,
A highly developed stock exchange cannot be a club for the cult of ethics.
Max Weber Quotes: A highly developed stock exchange
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 Quotes: Ideas come when we do
A number of those sections of the old Empire which were most highly developed economically and most favored by natural resources and situation, in particular a majority of the wealthy towns went over to Protestantism in the sixteenth century The results of that circumstance favor the Protestants even today in their strug gle for economic existence.
Max Weber Quotes: A number of those sections
The experience of the irrationality of the world has been the driving force of all religious revolution.
Max Weber Quotes: The experience of the irrationality
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 Quotes: The ability of mental concentration,
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 Quotes: Calvinist believers were psychologically isolated.
The ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility are not opposites. They are complementary to one another.
Max Weber Quotes: The ethic of conviction and
That in East Prussia Frederick William I tolerated the Mennonites as indispensable to industry,
Max Weber Quotes: That in East Prussia Frederick
The final result of political action often, no regularly, stands in completely inadequate and often even paradoxical relation to its original meaning.
Max Weber Quotes: The final result of political
The fully developed bureaucratic apparatus compares with other organisations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of production.
Max Weber Quotes: The fully developed bureaucratic apparatus
The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.
Max Weber Quotes: The fate of our times
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 Quotes: For bourgeois classes as such
[In] the realm of science, ... what we have achieved will be obsolete in ten, twenty or fifty years. That is the fate, indeed, that is the very meaning of scientific work ... Every scientific "fulfillment" raises new "questions" and cries out to be surpassed rendered obsolete. Everyone who wishes to serve science has to resign himself to this.
Max Weber Quotes: [In] the realm of science,
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 Quotes: The only way of living
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 Quotes: The primary task of a
Rational conduct on the basis of the idea of calling, was born... from the spirit of Christian asceticism.
Max Weber Quotes: Rational conduct on the basis
Of course the Catholic ethic was an ethic of intentions. But the concrete intentio of the single act determined its value. And the single good or bad action was credited to the doer determining his temporal and eternal fate. Quite realistically the Church recognized that man was not an absolutely clearly defined unity to be judged one way or the other, but that his moral life was normally subject to conflicting motives and his action contradictory.
Max Weber Quotes: Of course the Catholic ethic
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 Quotes: All the analysis of infinite
For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.
Max Weber Quotes: For when asceticism was carried
The decisive means for politics is violence.
Max Weber Quotes: The decisive means for politics
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 Quotes: Weber's achievement was not to
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 Quotes: Tolstoi has given the simplest
Every type of purely direct concrete description bears the mark of artistic portrayal.
Max Weber Quotes: Every type of purely direct
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 Quotes: It is not astonishing that
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 Quotes: Not everyone realises that to
The idea that modern labour has an ascetic character is of course not new. Limitation to specialized work, with a renunciation of the Faustian universality of man which it involves, is a condition of any valuable work in the modern world; hence deeds and renunciation inevitably condition each other to-day. This fundamentally ascetic trait of middle-class life, if it attempts to be a way of life at all, and not simply the absence of any, was what Goethe wanted to teach, at the height of his wisdom, in the Wanderjahren, and in the end which he gave to the life of his Faust. For him the realization meant a renunciation, a departure from an age of full and beautiful humanity, which can no more be repeated in the course of our cultural development than can the flower of the Athenian culture of antiquity.
Max Weber Quotes: The idea that modern labour
Nothing is worthy of man as man unless he can pursue it with passionate devotion.
Max Weber Quotes: Nothing is worthy of man
A government is an institution that holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.
Max Weber Quotes: A government is an institution
Those human groups that
entertain a subjective belief in
their common descent because of similarities of physical type or of customs or both, or because of memories of colonization
and migration; this belief must be important for group
formation; furthermore it does not matter whether an objective blood relationship exists.
Max Weber Quotes: Those human groups that <br>
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.
Max Weber Quotes: A fully developed bureaucratic mechanism
... Whenever the man of science introduces his personal value judgment, a full understanding of the facts ceases.
Max Weber Quotes: ... Whenever the man of
It's the intellectual who transforms the concept of the world into the problem of meaning.
Max Weber Quotes: It's the intellectual who transforms
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 Quotes: The summum bonum of this
The ultimately possible attitudes toward life are irreconcilable, and hence their struggle can never be brought to a final conclusion.
Max Weber Quotes: The ultimately possible attitudes toward
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 Quotes: Politics means striving to share
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 Quotes: Beware of thinking all your
The fortunate man is seldom satisfied with the fact of being fortunate, beyond this he needs to know that he has a right to his good fortune. He wants to be convinced he deserves it and above all that he deserves it in comparison with others. Good fortune, thus wants to be legitimate fortune.
Max Weber Quotes: The fortunate man is seldom
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 Quotes: In the midst of a
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.
Max Weber Quotes: The impulse to acquisition, pursuit
The purely emotional form of Pietism is, as Ritschl has pointed out, a religious dilettantism for the leisure class.
Max Weber Quotes: The purely emotional form of
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 Quotes: However many people complain about
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 Quotes: In Baxter's view the care
Every scientific fulfillment raises new questions; it asks to be surpassed and outdated.
Max Weber Quotes: Every scientific fulfillment raises new
spirit of capitalism is best understood as part of the development of rationalism as a whole,
Max Weber Quotes: spirit of capitalism is best
The process of sanctifying life could thus almost take on the character of a business enterprise.
Max Weber Quotes: The process of sanctifying life
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 Quotes: Its entry on the scene
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 Quotes: Social economic problems do not
Within the confines of the lecture hall, no other virtue exists but plain intellectual integrity.
Max Weber Quotes: Within the confines of the
...Material goods have gained an increasing and finally inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history.
Max Weber Quotes: ...Material goods have gained an
One cannot prescribe to anyone whether he should follow an ethic of absolute ends or an ethic of responsibility.
Max Weber Quotes: One cannot prescribe to anyone
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.
Max Weber Quotes: The modern view of criminal
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 Quotes: Homelessness is the fundamental idea
One may attain salvation in any walk of life; on
Max Weber Quotes: One may attain salvation in
Causal analysis provides absolutely no value judgment, and a value judgment is absolutely not a causal explanation.
Max Weber Quotes: Causal analysis provides absolutely no
Daily and hourly, the politician inwardly has to overcome a quite trivial and all-too-human enemy: a quite vulgar vanity.
Max Weber Quotes: Daily and hourly, the politician
Man does not by nature wish to earn more and more money.
Max Weber Quotes: Man does not by nature
... 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 Quotes: ... It is immensely moving
The conceptions of idle talk, of superfluities, and of vain ostentation, all designations of an irrational attitude without objective purpose, thus
Max Weber Quotes: The conceptions of idle talk,
Laws are important and valuable in the exact natural sciences, in the measure that those sciences are universally valid.
Max Weber Quotes: Laws are important and valuable
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