Max Weber Quotes

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

The decisive means for politics is violence. ~ Max Weber

Weber also saw that a bureaucratic world contained risks. It produced increasingly powerful and autonomous bureaucrats who could be spiritless, driven only by impersonal rules and procedures, and with little regard for the people they were expected to serve. Weber famously warned that those who allow themselves to be guided by rules will soon find that those rules have defined their identities and commitments. ~ Michael Barnett

Today nothing is more modern than the onslaught against the political. American financiers, industrial technicians, Marxist socialists, and anarchic-syndicalist revolutionaries unite in demanding that the biased rule of politics over unbiased economic management be done away with. There must no longer be political problems, only organizational-technical and economic-sociological tasks. The kind of economic-technical thinking that prevails today is no longer capable of perceiving a political idea. The modern state seems to have actually become what Max Weber envisioned: a huge industrial plant. ~ Carl Schmitt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ultimately possible attitudes toward life are irreconcilable, and hence their struggle can never be brought to a final conclusion. ~ Max Weber

One may attain salvation in any walk of life; on ~ Max Weber

The process of sanctifying life could thus almost take on the character of a business enterprise. ~ Max Weber

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

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

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

Throughout this book I have tried to point out why interest, especially as it has been used by people such as Hume, Smith, Tocqueville, and Weber, is still a very useful concept. One reason why the concept of interest imparts a distinct dynamic to the analysis is that it is mainly interest which makes people takes action. It supplies the force that makes people get up at dawn and work very hard throughout the day. Combined with interests of others, it is a force that can move mountains and create new societies. ~ Richard Swedberg

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

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

The radical elimination of magic from the world allowed no other psychological course than the practice of worldly asceticism. Since ~ Max Weber

The purely emotional form of Pietism is, as Ritschl has pointed out, a religious dilettantism for the leisure class. ~ 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

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

That in East Prussia Frederick William I tolerated the Mennonites as indispensable to industry, ~ 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

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

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

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

Daily and hourly, the politician inwardly has to overcome a quite trivial and all-too-human enemy: a quite vulgar vanity. ~ 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

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

In an analogy that would prove all too apt, Max Weber likened the city to a human being with his skin removed. ~ Erik Larson

The state's exclusive claim to violence to uphold its rule of law is, according to many, the very essence of statehood. For instance, in 1919, the eminent German sociologist Max Weber defined the state as "a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory."6 This definition remains widely used today, and states that cannot maintain a monopoly of force and endure civil war or frequent violent crime are routinely described as "weak," "fragile," or "failed" states. ~ Sean McFate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Either one lives 'for' politics or one lives 'off' politics. ~ Max Weber

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One cannot prescribe to anyone whether he should follow an ethic of absolute ends or an ethic of responsibility. ~ Max Weber

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

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

Calvinism, in comparison, appears to be more closely related to the hard legalism and the active enterprise of bourgeois-capitalistic entrepreneurs. Finally, ~ Max Weber

Within the confines of the lecture hall, no other virtue exists but plain intellectual integrity. ~ Max Weber

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

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

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

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

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

A highly developed stock exchange cannot be a club for the cult of ethics. ~ Max Weber

spirit of capitalism is best understood as part of the development of rationalism as a whole, ~ Max Weber

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

It's the intellectual who transforms the concept of the world into the problem of meaning. ~ Max Weber

A slightly different version of the argument
this is really the core of Max Weber's reflections on the subject
is that a bureaucracy, once created, will immediately move to make itself indispensable to anyone trying to wield power, no matter what they wish to do with it. The chief way to do this is always by attempting to monopolize access to certain key types of information. ~ David Graeber

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

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

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

The conceptions of idle talk, of superfluities, and of vain ostentation, all designations of an irrational attitude without objective purpose, thus ~ Max Weber

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

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

I hope nobody I wrote about becomes too upset. ~ Max Tundra

Max?' he asked.
'Yeah?'
'...What are you doing?'
'Shooting people. ~ A. Ashley Straker

Um, I think I left my handkerchief on the table," Jane said. "I'll just run down and fetch it. There's no need to wait for me--you go on to bed."
Lisette stopped to stare at her in bewilderment. "Your handkerchief will be perfectly fine where it is. A footman will find it and give it to you in the morning."
"No, I dare not leave it or I'll forget about it in the confusion of our departure." She was already turning to descend the stairs. "And it's my favorite."
Jane didn't stop to see if Lisette believed that nonsense. She just hastened down, trying to figure out how to get Dom alone.
Fortunately, just as she approached the dining room, she heard the duke say from inside, "Sorry to be a wet blanket, old chap, but I shall turn in, too. Lisette and I don't usually rise as early as we did this morning."
"So I've noticed." Then Dom added hastily, "Not that it matters, mind you. Everyone has his own habits."
"Yes, that's true." The duke's puzzled tone showed he was unaware of what his wife had said yesterday about his "habits."
"Don't forget that we must leave as early tomorrow as possible."
"Of course."
"I'm hoping Tristan will have arrived by then, but if not, we'll press on without him."
"Certainly," Max said, rather stiffly now. He probably wasn't used to being ordered about by anyone, even his brother-in-law. "Well, good night, then."
Hearing footsteps approaching, Jane darted quickly into an alcove and waited with heart p ~ Sabrina Jeffries

The more you hide the truth, the quicker it finds you - Max, The Prince of Midst ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Lower your expectations of earth. This isn't Heaven, so don't expect it to be. ~ Max Lucado

There is always more demand for great content then there will be great content to satisfy it. ~ Tucker Max

It seems obvious to me now – though I have been slow, I must say, in coming to the conclusion – that the institution of private property is one of the main things that have given man that limited amount of free-and-equalness that Marx hoped to render infinite by abolishing this institution. Strangely enough Marx was the first to see this. He is the one who informed us, looking backwards, that the evolution of private capitalism with its free market had been a precondition for the evolution of all our democratic freedoms. It never occurred to him, looking forward, that if this was so, these other freedoms might disappear with the abolition of the free market. ~ Max Eastman

Obviously, I love Japanese food. My favorite TV show of all time, without exception, is 'Iron Chef.' Not the stupid American version; 'Iron Chef' Japanese; the real one, the one that was on in Japan ... my DVR for years was set to record almost every single 'Iron Chef' episode. ~ Tucker Max

And she accepted the bridge date from the tentacled horror, with the proviso that her schedule would be inflexible for the next several weeks. Up ~ Max Gladstone

Let me say that the credit belongs to the boys in the back rooms. It isn't the man who sits in the limelight like me who should have the praise. ~ Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook

It is not only more bloody and more murderous than any previous wars but also more cruel, more relentless, more pitiless ... It discards all the parameters to which we defer in times of peace and which we called the rights of man. It does not recognise the privileges of the wounded man or of the doctor and it does not distinguish between non-combatants and the fighting part of the population. ~ Max Hastings

I don't know why it is we are in such a hurry to get up when we fall down. You might think we would lie there and rest for a while. ~ Max Eastman

Subject matter comes to you, you don't go to it ... Although I shoot extemporaneously a lot of the time, I prefer to have half a dozen shots in my mind. Probably I have seen them many times under different conditions and I have been thinking about them. The moment shall come when I shall go back to them and make the photographs. ~ Max Dupain