Max Weber Quotes

53 quotes in 957 categories

• 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…
• Capitalism may even be identical with the restraint, or at least a rational tempering, of this irrational impulse. But capitalism is identical with the restraint,…
• Daily and hourly, the politician inwardly has to overcome a quite trivial and all-too-human enemy: a quite vulgar vanity.
• 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…
• 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…
• The purely emotional form of Pietism is, as Ritschl has pointed out, a religious dilettantism for the leisure class.
• 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…
• 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…
• The fully developed bureaucratic apparatus compares with other organisations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of production.
• The experience of the irrationality of the world has been the driving force of all religious revolution.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Either one lives for politics or one lives off politics.
• 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…
• The decisive means for politics is violence.
• 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…
• The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.
• The primary task of a useful teacher is to teach his students to recognize 'inconvenient' facts - I mean facts that are inconvenient for their…

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