Max Weber Quotes
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.
Weber, Max. "Science as a Vocation." From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, translated and edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, Oxford University Press, 1946, p. 135.
While the context applied to making business policy decisions, he also advocated it for politics and managing government. If policy makers or managers speculate and then act to fix possible and imaginable problem, they will waste time and resources dealing with eventualities that may never come to pass. A better strategy is to obtain data, analysize that, and fix the problems that we know will occur.
Maximilian Karl Emil Weber was a German sociologist, historian, jurist, and political economist, who is regarded among the most important theorists on the development of modern Western society. His ideas would profoundly influence social theory and social research. Despite being recognized as one of the fathers of sociology, along with Auguste Comte and Émile Durkheim, Weber never saw himself as a sociologist, but as an historian.
