Max Weber Quotes & Sayings

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

“'Culture' is a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of the world process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning and significance.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Within the confines of the lecture hall, no other virtue exists but plain intellectual integrity.”

“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 being 'worthy of being known.'”

“Only by strict specialization can the scientific worker become fully conscious, for once and perhaps never again in his lifetime, that he has achieved something that will endure. A really definitive and good accomplishment is today always a specialized act.”

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

“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.”