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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Max Weber

'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

Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.

Max Weber

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

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

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

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

Max Weber

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

Either one lives 'for' politics or one lives 'off' politics.

Max Weber

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

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 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.

Max Weber