1. “It is not true that good an follow only from good and evil only from evil, but that often opposite is true.”
2. “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.”
3. “Every scientific fulfillment raises new questions; it asks to be surpassed and outdated.”
4. “One can say that three pre-eminent qualities are decisive for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion.”
5. “Laws are important and valuable in the exact natural sciences, in the measure that those sciences are universally valid.”
6. “Causal analysis provides absolutely no value judgement, and a value judgement is absolutely not a causal explanation.”
7. “The experience of the irrationality of the world has been the driving force of all religious revolution.”
8. “The ethic of conviction an the ethic of responsibility are not opposites. They are complementary to one another.”
9. “Charisma is the gift from above where a leader knows from inside himself what to do.”
10. “Either one lies for politics or one lives off politics.”
11. “Within the confines of the lecture hall, no other virtue exists but plain intellectual integrity.”
12. “The decisive means for politics is violence.”
13. “Not everyone realises that to write a really good piece of journalism is at least demanding intellectually as the achievement of any scholar.”
14. “Politics means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state.”
15. “A government is an institution that holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.”
16. “Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.”
17. “Whenever known and sufficient causes are available, it is anti-scientific to discard them in favour of a hypothesis that can never be verified.”
18. “Nothing is worthy of man as man unless he can pursue it with passionate devotion.”
19. “Man does not by nature wish to earn more and more money.”
20. “Power is the chance to impose your will within a social context, even when opposed and regardless of the integrity of that chance.”
21. “A highly developed stock exchange cannot be a club for the cult of ethics.”
22. “The ultimately possible attitudes towards life are irreconcilable, an hence their struggle can never be brought to a final conclusion.”
23. “It’s the intellectual who transforms the concept of the world into the problem of meaning.”
24. “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.”
25. “Every type of purely direct concrete description bears the mark of artistic portrayal.”
26. “The final result of political action often, no regularly stands in completely inadequate and often even paradoxical relation to its original meaning.”
27. “The process of sanctifying life could thus almost take on the character of a business enterprise.”
28. “Remember, that money is of the prolific, generating nature. Money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more, and so on.”
29. “What kind of man must one be if he is allowed to put his hand on the wheel of history?”
30. “Because death is meaningless, civilised life as such is meaningless.”
