Max Weber Quotes

“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

“Max Weber was right in subscribing to the view that one need not be Caesar in order to understand Caesar. But there is a temptation for us theoretical sociologists to act sometimes as though it is not necessary even to study Caesar in order to understand him. Yet we know that the interplay of theory and research makes both for understanding of the specific case and expansion of the general rule.”
― Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure

“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

“Há duas maneiras de fazer política. Ou se vive 'para' a política ou se vive 'da' política. Nessa oposição não há nada de exclusivo. Muito ao contrário, em geral se fazem uma e outra coisa ao mesmo tempo, tanto idealmente quanto na prática”
― Max Weber

“I think, if people actually read Calvin, rather than read Max Weber, he would be rebranded. He is a very respectable thinker. And one of the crucial things he brings to me, is that the encounter with another being is an . . . occasion in which you can, to the best of your ability, honour the other person as being someone sent to you by God.”
― Marilynne Robinson

“Very few politicians, who have chosen a political career, can fulfill the aspirations and survive the strains of an elevated office that in a monarchy was filled so randomly. Each tsar had to be simultaneously dictator and supreme general, high priest and Little Father. They required all the qualities listed by the sociologist Max Weber: the personal gift of grace, the virtue of legality, and "the authority of the eternal yesterday.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs, 1613-1918

“Irrespective, he blames other people for all of those things, including forgetting his passport. I guess that's what it's like to live in a bubble, like Mark does. But a bubble implies flimsy transparency, a diaphanous space where you can see a normal life just beyond your grasp. And what Mark inhabits is more like a thick opaque dome, a murky fortress that separates him from the rest of the world. When you have so many other people doing things for you professionally and personally, you stop taking responsibility for any of it. Max Weber said that dealing with unintended consequences of your actions is what political responsibility is. This guy can't even take responsibility for leaving his passport at home, let alone influencing the US election.”
― Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

“Weber also saw that a bureaucratic world contained risks. It produced increasingly powerful and autonomous bureaucrats who could be spiritless, driven only by impersonal rules and procedures, and with little regard for the people they were expected to serve. Weber famously warned that those who allow themselves to be guided by rules will soon find that those rules have defined their identities and commitments.”
― Michael Barnett, Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda

“Das Konzept Gottes geworden in Anatolien und wurde dem Westen auferlegt.”
― Max Weber, Social Psychology

“A completely different aspect, however, the thoroughly incommensurable one, lies in the imposition of accepting that the torso sees me while I observe it - indeed, that it eyes me more sharply than I can look at it.

The ability to perform the inner gesture with which one makes space for this improbability inside oneself most probably consists precisely in the talent that Max Weber denied having. This talent is 'religiosity', understood as an innate disposition and a talent that can be developed, making it comparable to musicality. One can practise it, just as one practises melodic passages or syntactic patterns. In this sense, religiosity is congruent with a certain grammatical promiscuity. Where it operates, objects elastically exchange places with subjects.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, Du mußt dein Leben ändern

“A slightly different version of the argument--this is really the core of Max Weber's reflections on the subject--is that a bureaucracy, once created, will immediately move to make itself indispensable to anyone trying to wield power, no matter what they wish to do with it. The chief way to do this is always by attempting to monopolize access to certain key types of information.”
― David Graeber

“Throughout this book I have tried to point out why interest, especially as it has been used by people such as Hume, Smith, Tocqueville, and Weber, is still a very useful concept. One reason why the concept of interest imparts a distinct dynamic to the analysis is that it is mainly interest which makes people takes action. It supplies the force that makes people get up at dawn and work very hard throughout the day. Combined with interests of others, it is a force that can move mountains and create new societies.”
― Richard Swedberg, Principles of Economic Sociology

“Weber, once said three qualities are decisive for political leaders: "passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion." A great statesman, however, has additional advantages: strength of soul, firmness, sound judgment, self-confidence and shrewdness. An effective national strategy depends not only on good ideas, but firmness in carrying them forward. If a nation cannot promote, within itself, great statesmen or strategists, then it may lose ground to other nations.
J.R.Nyquist”
― J.R.Nyquist

“Will the dwindling of religion and community jeopardize social order? Will we be able to live meaningful lives in the absence of sacredness? In particular, Max Weber was troubled by Dostoevsky's and Tolstoy's questions: If we are no longer afraid of God, what will make us moral? If we are not engaged in and compelled by sacred, collective, and binding meanings, what will make our lives meaningful? If the individual rather than God is at the center of morality, what will become of the ethic of brotherliness that had been the driving force of religions?”
― Eva Illouz, Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation