Top 60 Max Weber Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Max Weber

2. “Charisma is the gift from above where a leader knows from inside himself what to do.”

— Max Weber

3. “Power is the chance to impose your will within a social context, even when opposed and regardless of the integrity of that chance.”

— Max Weber

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

— Max Weber

5. “The decisive means for politics is violence.”

— Max Weber

6. “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.”

— Max Weber

7. “Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs – these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic administration.”

— Max Weber

8. “Ideas come when we do not expect them, and not when we are brooding and searching at our desks. Yet ideas would certainly not come to mind had we not brooded at our desks and searched for answers with passionate devotion.”

— Max Weber

9. “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.”

— Max Weber

10. “Work hard in your calling.”

— Max Weber

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

— Max Weber

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

— Max Weber

13. “Nothing is worthy of man as man unless he can pursue it with passionate devotion.”

— Max Weber

14. “It is not true that good can only follow from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true.”

— Max Weber

15. “It’s the intellectual who transforms the concept of the world into the problem of meaning.”

— Max Weber

16. “Politics means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state.”

— Max Weber

17. “The purely emotional form of Pietism is, as Ritschl has pointed out, a religious dilettantism for the leisure class.”

— Max Weber

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

— Max Weber

19. “The Truth is the Truth.”

— Max Weber

20. “Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.”

— Max Weber

21. “One can say that three pre-eminent qualities are decisive for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion.”

— Max Weber

22. “The experience of the irrationality of the world has been the driving force of all religious revolution.”

— Max Weber

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

— Max Weber

24. “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.”

— Max Weber

25. “Every scientific fulfillment raises new questions; it asks to be surpassed and outdated.”

— Max Weber

26. “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 an end in itself.”

— Max Weber

27. “Laws are important and valuable in the exact natural sciences, in the measure that those sciences are universally valid.”

— Max Weber

28. “A highly developed stock exchange cannot be a club for the cult of ethics.”

— Max Weber

29. “Puritanism carried the ethos of the rational organization of capital and labor. It took over from the Jewish ethic only what was adapted to this purpose.”

— Max Weber

30. “Daily and hourly, the politician inwardly has to overcome a quite trivial and all-too-human enemy: a quite vulgar vanity.”

— Max Weber

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

— Max Weber

32. “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.”

— Max Weber

33. “The fully developed bureaucratic apparatus compares with other organisations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of production.”

— Max Weber

34. “Causal analysis provides absolutely no value judgment, and a value judgment is absolutely not a causal explanation.”

— Max Weber

35. “The primary task of a useful teacher is to teach his students to recognize ‘inconvenient’ facts – I mean facts that are inconvenient for their party opinions.”

— Max Weber

36. “The ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility are not opposites. They are complementary to one another.”

— Max Weber

37. “The intellect, like all cultural values, has created an aristocracy based on the possession of rational culture and independent of all personal ethical qualities of man. The aristocracy of intellect is hence an unbrotherly aristocracy.”

— Max Weber

38. “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.”

— Max Weber

39. “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.”

— Max Weber

40. “The final result of political action often, no regularly, stands in completely inadequate and often even paradoxical relation to its original meaning.”

— Max Weber

41. “Its entry on the scene was not generally peaceful. A flood of mistrust, sometimes of hatred, above all of moral indignation, regularly opposed itself to the first innovator.”

— Max Weber

42. “Whenever known and sufficient causes are available, it is anti-scientific to discard them in favour of a hypothesis that can never be verified.”

— Max Weber

43. “Beware of thinking all your own that you possess, and of living accordingly. It is a mistake that many people who have credit fall into.”

— Max Weber

44. “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.”

— Max Weber

45. “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.”

— Max Weber

46. “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.”

— Max Weber

47. “The nation is burdened with the heavy curse on those who come afterwards. The generation before us was inspired by an activism and a naive enthusiasm, which we cannot rekindle, because we confront tasks of a different kind from those which our fathers faced.”

— Max Weber

48. “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.”

— Max Weber

49. “St. Paul’s “He who will not work shall not eat” holds.”

— Max Weber

50. “Where ‘doing one’s job’ cannot be directly linked to the highest spiritual and cultural values – although it may be felt to be more than mere economic coercion – the individual today usually makes no attempt to find any meaning in it. Where capitalism is at its most unbridled, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, divested of its metaphysical significance, today tends to be associated with purely elemental passions, which at times virtually turn it into a sporting contest.”

— Max Weber