specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.

Whenever known and sufficient causes are available, it is anti-scientific to discard them in favour of a hypothesis that can never be verified.

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.

The purely emotional form of Pietism is, as Ritschl has pointed out, a religious dilettantism for the leisure class.

Politics means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state.

A government is an institution that holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.

The nation is burdened with the heavy curse on those who come afterwards. The generation before us was inspired by an activism and a naive enthusiasm, which we cannot rekindle, because we confront tasks of a different kind from those which our fathers faced.