Max Weber

Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective.

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

I am a member of the bourgeoisie and feel myself to be such, and I have been brought up in their opinions and ideals.

The Protestant wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so.

Vanity is a very widely spread trait and probably nobody is entirely free of it. Certainly, among scholars and academic circles it is kind of an occupational disease. Nevertheless, especially for a scholar, vanity is distasteful when it expresses itself, but it is relatively harmless because it does not disrupt the functioning of academic organizations. This is completely different in a politician for whom the pursuit of power is a means unto itself.

To put it bluntly, I ask myself firstly, are such people truly serious about any ethical and moral convictions? I am convinced that in nine out of ten cases, they are windbags puffed up with hot air about themselves. They are not in touch with reality, and they do not feel the burden they need to shoulder—they just intoxicate themselves with romantic sensations.

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.

It is not true that good can follow only from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true. Anyone who fails to see this is, indeed, a political infant.

specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.

It is horrible to think that the world could one day be filled with nothing but those little cogs, little men clinging to little jobs and striving towards bigger ones - a state of affairs which is to be seen once more, as in the Egyptian records, playing an ever-increasing part in the spirit of our present administrative system, and especially of its offspring, the students. This passion for bureaucracy ... is enough to drive one to despair.

In that case the word holds for these youths: 'Mind you, the devil is old; grow old to understand him.'

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

The first task of a competent teacher is to teach his students to acknowledge inconvenient facts. By these I mean facts that are inconvenient for their own personal political views. Such extremely inconvenient facts exist for every political position.

And anyone who lacks the ability to don blinkers for once and to convince himself that the destiny of his soul depends upon whether he is right to make precisely this conjecture and no other at this point in his manuscript should keep well away from science. He will never be able to submit to what we may call the 'experience' of science.

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. 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 often small indeed.

The bureaucracy is the means of transforming social action into rationally organized action.

The Protestant ethic was the foundation of modern rational capitalism.

Politics is the strong and slow boring of hard boards.

The decisive means for politics is violence.

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