"Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and a sense of proportion."
When you're working on something as tough as a hard board, what small sign tells you that you're slowly getting through?
Why Is Changing the World So Slow?
Max Weber was a German sociologist who analyzed modern capitalism and bureaucracy. In Munich, seething with revolutionary fervor just after Germany's defeat in World War I, he stood before students swept up in impatient idealism.
In his January 1919 lecture 'Politics as a Vocation', he argued that politics is impossible with passion alone or cold calculation alone. Weber himself suffered a severe breakdown in 1897 after a bitter quarrel with his father, who died suddenly weeks later; unable to teach for years, he slowly recovered and went on to write The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.