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

The career of politics grants a feeling of power. The knowledge of influencing men, of participating in power over them, and above all, the feeling of holding in one's hands a nerve fiber of historically important events can elevate the professional politician above everyday routine even when he is placed in formally modest positions.

The fate of an epoch that has eaten of the tree of knowledge is that it must...recognize that general views of life and the universe can never be the products of increasing empirical knowledge, and that the highest ideals, which move us most forcefully, are always formed only in the struggle with other ideals which are just as sacred to others as ours are to us.

The organization of ofices follows the principle of hierarchy ... each lower office is under the control and supervision of a higher one

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

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.

Puritanism carried the ethos of the rational organization of capital and labor. It took over from the Jewish ethic only what was adapted to this purpose.