“Now in such an age, conviction politicians may well spring up in large numbers all of a sudden, and run riot, declaring, 'The world is stupid and nasty, not I. The responsibility for the consequences cannot be laid at my door but must rest with those who employ me and whose stupidity or nastiness I…”— Max Weber, amazon.comTagged: Inner Gravity, Revolution
“The only man who has a 'vocation' for politics is one who is certain that his spirit will not be broken if the world, when looked at from his point of view, proves too stupid or base to accept what he wishes to offer it, and who, when faced with all that obduracy, can still say 'Nevertheless!' despi…”— Max Weber, amazon.comTagged: Ethics, Neverthless, How To Live, My Philosophy
“If we understand the matter correctly (something that must be assumed here) we can compel a person, or at least help him, to render an account of the ultimate meaning of his own actions.”— Max Weber, amazon.comTagged: Direction, Identity, Management, Meaning
“It is entirely true and a fundamental fact of all history (though one we cannot explore further here) that the ultimate product of political activity frequently, indeed, as a matter of course, fails utterly to do justice to its original purpose and may even be a travesty of it.”— Max Weber, amazon.comTagged: History, Politics, Theory and Practice, Unforeseen Consequences
“The simplest reply was given by Tolstoy with his statement, 'Science is meaningless because it has no answer to the only questions that matter to us: What should we do? How shall we live?’ The fact that science cannot give us this answer is absolutely indisputable. The question is only in what sense…”— Max Weber, amazon.comTagged: Epistemology, Knowledge, Liberal Arts, Science
“And anyone who lacks the ability to don blinkers for once and to convince himself that the destiny of his soul depends upon whether he is right to make precisely this conjecture and no other at this point in his manuscript should keep well away from science. He will never be able to submit to what w…”— Max Weber, amazon.comTagged: Intellectualism, Passion, Vocation