115 Quotes by 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.

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.

Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he will not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say In spite of all! has the calling for politics.

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.

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

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.

Not everyone realises that to write a really good piece of journalism is at least as demanding intellectually as the achievement of any scholar.

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.

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