Max Weber

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

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

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.

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the 'disenchantment of the world.' Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental.

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

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

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

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.'

One cannot prescribe to anyone whether he should follow an ethic of absolute ends or an ethic of responsibility.

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

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

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.

Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.

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.

The fate of an epoch that has eaten of the tree of knowledge is that it must...recognize that general views of life and the universe can never be the products of increasing empirical knowledge, and that the highest ideals, which move us most forcefully, are always formed only in the struggle with other ideals which are just as sacred to others as ours are to us.

Capitalism may even be identical with the restraint, or at least a rational tempering, of this irrational impulse. But capitalism is identical with the restraint, or at least a rational tempering, of this irrational impulse. But capitalism is identical with the pursuit of profit, and forever renewed profit, by means of continuous, rational, capitalistic enterprise.

The impulse to acquisition, pursuit of gain, of money, of the greatest possible amount of money, has in itself nothing to do with capitalism. This impulse exists and has existed among waiters, physicians, coachmen, artists, prostitutes, dishonest officials, soldiers, nobles, crusaders, gamblers, and beggars.