115 Quotes by Max Weber

... A state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopolyof the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.

The fortunate man is seldom satisfied with the fact of being fortunate, beyond this he needs to know that he has a right to his good fortune. He wants to be convinced he deserves it and above all that he deserves it in comparison with others. Good fortune, thus wants to be legitimate fortune.

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

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.

Bureaucracy develops the more perfectly, the more it is 'dehumanized', the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation.

It's the intellectual who transforms the concept of the world into the problem of meaning.

Tolstoi has given the simplest answer, with the words: ‘Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: "What shall we do and how shall we live?"' That science does not give an answer to this is indisputable. The only question that remains is the sense in which science gives ‘no’ answer, and whether or not science might yet be of use to the one who puts the question correctly.

Rational conduct on the basis of the idea of calling, was born... from the spirit of Christian asceticism.

Pessoalmente, jamais admiti que, ao longo de uma discussão, se procurasse garantir vantagem exibindo a certidão de nascimento. (...) Não importa a idade, mas sim a soberana competência do olhar, que sabe ver as realidades da vida, e a força da alma que é capaz de suportá-las e de elevar-se à altura delas