“Rational conduct on the basis of the idea of calling, was born... from the spirit of Christian asceticism.”

“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.”

“Schumpeter remarked how pleased he was with the Russian Revolution. Socialism was now no longer a discussion on paper, but had to prove its viability. Max Weber responded in great agitation: Communism, at this stage in Russian development, was virtually a crime, the road would lead over unparalleled human misery and end in a terrible catastrophe. "Quite likely", Schumpeter answered, "but what a fine laboratory". "A laboratory filled with mounds of corpses", Weber answered heatedly.”

“In the midst of a culture that is rationally organized for a vocational workaday life, there is hardly any room for the cultivation of acosmic brotherliness, unless it is among strata who are economically carefree. Under the technical and social conditions of rational culture, an imitation of the life of Buddha, Jesus, or Francis seems condemned to failure for purely external reasons.”

“The final result of political action often, no regularly, stands in completely inadequate and often even paradoxical relation to its original meaning.”

“Weber,... argues that... personal bias should not preclude the scientific ascertainment of objective historical facts.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Either one lives 'for' politics or one lives 'off' politics.”

“Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.”

“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.”