[In] the realm of science, ... what we have achieved will be obsolete in ten, twenty or fifty years. That is the fate, indeed, that is the very meaning of scientific work. ... Every scientific "fulfillment" raises new "questions" and cries out to be surpassed rendered obsolete. Everyone who wishes to serve science has to resign himself to this.

A highly developed stock exchange cannot be a club for the cult of ethics.

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

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

Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs - these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic administration.

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

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.