Quotes from The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

By Max Weber (1905)

• A healthy fear is a better sign of grace than certainty, says Spener, Theologische Bedenken.#
  ReligionChristianityEthics
• Predestination made it fundamentally impossible for the State really to promote religion by intolerance. It could not thereby save a single soul. Only the idea of the glory of God gave the Church occasion to claim its help in the suppression of heresy. Now the greater the emphasis on the membership of the preacher, and all those that partook of the communion, in the elect, the more intolerable became the interference of the State in the appointment of the clergy.#
  ReligionChristianityPolitics
• The idea that the glory of God requires the subjection of the damned to the discipline of the Church was gradually superseded by the other idea, which was present from the beginning and became gradually more prominent, that it was an insult to His glory to partake of the Communion with one rejected by God. That necessarily led to voluntarism, for it led to the believers’ Church the religious community which included only the twice-born.#
  ReligionChristianityEcclesiology
• Ethical principles for the reform of the world could not be found in Luther’s realm of ideas.#
  EthicsCulturePoliticsChristianityReligion
• The universal reign of absolute unscrupulousness in the pursuit of selfish interests by the making of money has been a specific characteristic of precisely those countries whose bourgeois-capitalistic development, measured according to Occidental standards, has remained backward.#
  EthicsDevelopmentMoney
• The universal reign of absolute unscrupulousness in the pursuit of selfish interests by the making of money has been a specific characteristic of precisely those countries whose bourgeois-capitalistic development, measured according to Occidental standards, has remained backward.#
  CultureEconomics