The intellect, like all cultural values, has created an aristocracy based on the possession of rational culture and independent of all personal ethical qualities of man. The aristocracy of intellect is hence an unbrotherly aristocracy.
Weber,… argues that… personal bias should not preclude the scientific ascertainment of objective historical facts.
The final result of political action often, no regularly, stands in completely inadequate and often even paradoxical relation to its original meaning.
It is certain that there can be no work in political economy on any other than an altruistic basis… If our work is to retain any meaning it can only be informed by this: concern for the future, for those who will come after us.
As intellectualism suppresses belief in magic, the world’s processes become disenchanted, lose the magical significance, and henceforth simply ‘are’ and ‘happen’ but no longer signify anything.
… A state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopolyof the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.
Rational conduct on the basis of the idea of calling, was born… from the spirit of Christian asceticism.
Bureaucracy develops the more perfectly, the more it is ‘dehumanized’, the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation.
…Material goods have gained an increasing and finally inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history.
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.
… Whenever the man of science introduces his personal value judgment, a full understanding of the facts ceases.
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.
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.
It is not true that good can only follow from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true.
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.
Power is the chance to impose your will within a social context, even when opposed and regardless of the integrity of that chance.
Politics means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state.
All knowledge of cultural reality, as may be seen, is always knowledge from particular points of view.
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.
Either one lives ‘for’ politics or one lives ‘off’ politics.
Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.