The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Max Weber

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.

Time, Truth, Man

The career of politics grants a feeling of power. The knowledge of influencing men, of participating in power over them, and above all, the feeling of holding in one’s hands a nerve fiber of historically important events can elevate the professional politician above everyday routine even when he is placed in formally modest positions.

Power, Politics, Men

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

Reality, View, Always

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.

Unity, Speed, Personal

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

Politics, Influence

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

Integrity, Chance, Context

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.

Genius, Early, Communist

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

Evil, Good And Evil, True

No sociologist 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.

Time, Good, Old Age

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.

Party, Opinions, Facts

…Material goods have gained an increasing and finally inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history.

capitalism, poverty, wealth

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.

altruism, ethics, religion, vocation