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
Within the confines of the lecture hall, no other virtue exists but plain intellectual integrity.
Homelessness is the fundamental idea of salvation in Jainism. It means the breaking off of all earthly relations, and therefore, above all, indifference to general impressions and avoidance of all worldly motives, the ceasing to act, to hope, to desire.
Every type of purely direct concrete description bears the mark of artistic portrayal.
Laws are important and valuable in the exact natural sciences, in the measure that those sciences are universally valid.
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.
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.
The career of politics grants a feeling of power. The knowledge of influencing men, of participating in power over them, and above all, the feeling of holding in one's hands a nerve fiber of historically important events can elevate the professional politician above everyday routine even when he is placed in formally modest positions.
Not everyone realises that to write a really good piece of journalism is at least as demanding intellectually as the achievement of any scholar.
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.
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.
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.
One cannot prescribe to anyone whether he should follow an ethic of absolute ends or an ethic of responsibility.
Politics means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state.
Causal analysis provides absolutely no value judgment, and a value judgment is absolutely not a causal explanation.
All knowledge of cultural reality, as may be seen, is always knowledge from particular points of view.
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.'
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.
Power is the chance to impose your will within a social context, even when opposed and regardless of the integrity of that chance.
The ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility are not opposites. They are complementary to one another.
It is not true that good can only follow from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true.
Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.
One can say that three pre-eminent qualities are decisive for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion.
A highly developed stock exchange cannot be a club for the cult of ethics.
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.
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.
'Culture' is a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of the world process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning and significance.
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.
It is not astonishing that there are many journalists who have become human failures and worthless men. Rather, it is astonishing that, despite all this, this very stratum includes such a great number of valuable and quite genuine men, a fact that outsiders would not so easily guess.
Either one lives 'for' politics or one lives 'off' politics.
The fully developed bureaucratic apparatus compares with other organisations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of production.
Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he shall not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer.
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 our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.
