About Max Weber: Karl Emil Maximilian "Max" Weber is often cited, with Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx, as among the three founders of sociology.
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...
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.
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.
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 cond...
it is 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.
Únicamente quien está seguro de no doblegarse cuando, desde su punto de vista, el mundo se muestra demasiado necio o demasiado abyecto para aquello que él está ofreciéndole; únicamente quien, ante todas estas adversidades, es capaz de oponer un...
The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.
The ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility are not opposites. They are complementary to one another.
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 ...
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 ...
Laws are important and valuable in the exact natural sciences, in the measure that those sciences are universally valid.
'Culture' is a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of the world process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning and significance.
Every type of purely direct concrete description bears the mark of artistic portrayal.
Causal analysis provides absolutely no value judgment, and a value judgment is absolutely not a causal explanation.
One can say that three pre-eminent qualities are decisive for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion.
The fully developed bureaucratic apparatus compares with other organisations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of production.
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...
Within the confines of the lecture hall, no other virtue exists but plain intellectual integrity.
A highly developed stock exchange cannot be a club for the cult of ethics.
One cannot prescribe to anyone whether he should follow an ethic of absolute ends or an ethic of responsibility.
