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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.

Max Weber

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Max Weber
Age: 56 †
Born: 1864
Born: April 21
Died: 1920
Died: June 14
Anthropologist
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University Teacher
Maximilian Carl Emil Weber
Karl Emil Maximilian Weber
Max Vemper
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Maximilian Karl Emil Weber
Impossible
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Men
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Time
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Every type of purely direct concrete description bears the mark of artistic portrayal.
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A government is an institution that holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.
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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.
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Culture' is a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of the world process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning and significance.
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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.
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The organization of ofices follows the principle of hierarchy ... each lower office is under the control and supervision of a higher one
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The great virtue of bureaucracy - indeed, perhaps its defining characteristic ~ was that it was an institutional method for applying general rules to specific cases, thereby making the actions of government fair and predictable.
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A fully developed bureaucratic mechanism stands in the same relationship to other forms as does the machine to the non-mechanical production of goods. Precision, speed, clarity, documentary ability, continuity, discretion, unity, rigid subordination, reduction of friction and material and personal expenses are unique to bureaucratic organization.
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Daily and hourly, the politician inwardly has to overcome a quite trivial and all-too-human enemy: a quite vulgar vanity.
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Laws are important and valuable in the exact natural sciences, in the measure that those sciences are universally valid.
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Those human groups that entertain a subjective belief in their common descent because of similarities of physical type or of customs or both, or because of memories of colonization and migration this belief must be important for group formation furthermore it does not matter whether an objective blood relationship exists.
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The experience of the irrationality of the world has been the driving force of all religious revolution.
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[In] the realm of science, ... what we have achieved will be obsolete in ten, twenty or fifty years. That is the fate, indeed, that is the very meaning of scientific work. ... Every scientific fulfillment raises new questions and cries out to be surpassed rendered obsolete. Everyone who wishes to serve science has to resign himself to this
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