From Max Weber Quotes

“it is not true that good can follow only from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true. Anyone who fails to see this is, indeed, a political infant.”
― Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology

“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, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology

“The ultimately possible attitudes toward life are irreconcilable, and hence their struggle can never be brought to a final conclusion.”
― Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology

“...the ultimately possible attitudes toward life are irreconcilable, and hence their struggle can never be brought to a final conclusion. Thus it is necessary to make a decisive choice. Whether, under such conditions, science is a worth while 'vocation' for somebody, and whether science itself has an objectively valuable 'vocation' are again value judgments about which nothing can be said in the lecture-room. To affirm the value of science is a presupposition for teaching there. I personally by my very work answer in the affirmative, and I also do so from precisely the standpoint that hates intellectualism as the worst devil, as youth does today, or usually only fancies it does. In that case the word holds for these youths: 'Mind you, the devil is old; grow old to understand him.' This does not mean age in the sense of the birth certificate. It means that if one wishes to settle with this devil, one must not take flight before him as so many like to do nowadays. First of all, one has to see the devil's ways to the end in order to realize his power and his limitations.”
― Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology

“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.”
― Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology

“No sociologist, for instance, 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, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology

“The final result of political action often, no regularly, stands in completely inadequate and often even paradoxical relation to its original meaning.”
― Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology

“The task of the teacher is to serve the students with his knowledge and scientific experience and not to imprint upon them his personal political views.”
― Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology

“Yet it is a fact that no amount of such enthusiasm, however sincere and profound it may be, can compel a problem to yield scientific results.”
― Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology

“Weber,... argues that... personal bias should not preclude the scientific ascertainment of objective historical facts.”
― Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology