Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he will not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say In spite of all! has the calling for politics.

One can say that three pre-eminent qualities are decisive for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion.

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.

Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he will not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say In spite of all! has the calling for politics.

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.

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.

'Culture' is a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of the world process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning and significance.

All knowledge of cultural reality, as may be seen, is always knowledge from particular points of view.

All research in the cultural sciences in an age of specialization, once it is oriented towards a given subject matter through particular settings of problems and has established its methodological principles, will consider the analysis of the data as an end in itself.

All the analysis of infinite reality which the finite human mind can conduct rests on the tacit assumption that only a finite portion of this reality constitutes the object of scientific investigation, and that only it is 'important' in the sense of being 'worthy of being known.'

Causal analysis provides absolutely no value judgment, and a value judgment is absolutely not a causal explanation.

Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth - that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible.

It is not astonishing that there are many journalists who have become human failures and worthless men. Rather, it is astonishing that, despite all this, this very stratum includes such a great number of valuable and quite genuine men, a fact that outsiders would not so easily guess.

It is not true that good can only follow from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true.

Not everyone realises that to write a really good piece of journalism is at least as demanding intellectually as the achievement of any scholar.

Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he shall not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer.

Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.

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

Power is the chance to impose your will within a social context, even when opposed and regardless of the integrity of that chance.

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.

Social economic problems do not exist everywhere that an economic event plays a role as cause or effect - since problems arise only where the significance of those factors is problematical and can be precisely determined only through the application of methods of social-economics.

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 ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility are not opposites. They are complementary to one another.

The 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.

The primary task of a useful teacher is to teach his students to recognize 'inconvenient' facts - I mean facts that are inconvenient for their party opinions.

The so-called 'materialistic conception of history,' with the crude elements of genius of the early form which appeared, for instance, in the 'Communist Manifesto,' still prevails only in the minds of laymen and dilettantes.

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

Within the confines of the lecture hall, no other virtue exists but plain intellectual integrity.

Bureaucracy develops the more perfectly the more it is dehumanized the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from business love hatred and all purely personal irrational and emotional elements which escape calculation.

Charisma is the gift from above where a leader knows from inside himself what to do.

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and above all by the disenchantment of the world.

It's the intellectual who transforms the concept of the world into the problem of meaning.

We aim in the domain of politics at republicanism; in the domain of economics at socialism; in the domain of what is today called religion, at atheism.

I have come to realize that Jesse Helms stands for everything in politics that is anathema to me.

Like religion, politics, and family planning, cereal is not a topic to be brought up in public. It's too controversial.

I'm not an old, experienced hand at politics. But I am now seasoned enough to have learned that the hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning.

We live in a world in which politics has replaced philosophy.

I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.

Hope springs eternal, even in politics.

Politics is about winning. If you don't win, you don't get to put your principles into practice. Therefore, find a way to win, or sit the battle out.

I don't think at my age... you can start ruling people out in politics.

The new generation of Labour is different. Different attitudes, different ideas, different ways of doing politics.

The world of politics is always twenty years behind the world of thought.

A politics that is not sensitive to the concerns and circumstances of people's lives, a politics that does not speak to and include people, is an intellectually arrogant politics that deserves to fail.

The challenge is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

In almost every country there are elements of opinion which would welcome such a conclusion because they wish to return to the politics of the balance of power, unrestricted and unregulated armaments, international anarchy, and preparation for war.

Even if we don't know it or aren't aware of it, politics and philosophy are really what make our up lives.

So begins a question which has of late become more and more urgent: what is the relation of aesthetics to politics?