A government is an institution that holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.
Max WeberRead
'Culture' is a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of the world process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning and significance.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Culture provides humans with a framework to find meaning in an otherwise chaotic and meaningless world.
Max Weber's quote highlights the role of culture as a selective lens through which people interpret the vast, often overwhelming nature of existence. While the world is an infinite process that might appear to lack inherent meaning, culture enables human beings to create significance and order, allowing individuals to navigate their lives with understanding and purpose in a seemingly indifferent universe.
Themes
CultureMeaningExistenceSignificanceHumanity
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture on sociology, to illustrate the importance of culture in shaping human perception.
More from Max Weber
All quotes βThe 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.
Max WeberRead
The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the 'disenchantment of the world.' Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental.
Max WeberRead
The purely emotional form of Pietism is, as Ritschl has pointed out, a religious dilettantism for the leisure class.
Max WeberRead
Power is the chance to impose your will within a social context, even when opposed and regardless of the integrity of that chance.
Max WeberRead
Causal analysis provides absolutely no value judgment, and a value judgment is absolutely not a causal explanation.
Max WeberRead
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The U.S. should worry about the effects of its polices on the rest of the world. We would like to live in a world where countries take into account the effect of their policies on other countries and do what is right, broadly, rather than what is just right given the circumstances of that country.
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Lying in bed, he would think of Heaven and London.
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Gradually, ... the aspect of science as knowledge is being thrust into the background by the aspect of science as the power of manipulating nature. It is because science gives us the power of manipulating nature that it has more social importance than art. Science as the pursuit of truth is the equal, but not the superior, of art. Science as a technique, though it may have little intrinsic value, has a practical importance to which art cannot aspire.
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I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.
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Cicero is dead! Cicero is born! The laughter has filled me, filled me so very completely. I am the laughter. I am the jester. The soul that has served as my constant companion for so long has breached the veil of the Void finally and forever. It is now in me. It is me. The world has seen the last of Cicero the man. Behold Cicero, Fool of Hearts - laughter incarnate!
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