Peter Gay Quotations

My definition of modernism took a while to develop.

There is something very intriguing about, for example, the sense of accomplishment that a small child has, which you might be able to reduce to aggression and libido, but which might also have some independent existence.

What interests me, and has always interested me, has been modernism.

To have a liberal temperament is a kind of psychological boon, To be able to understand that someone you disagree with is not just a terrible creature but somebody with whom you disagree.

My assumption is that fundamentally the picture of the human animal, as developed by Freud, is largely right.

People seem to forget that one reason they are now thinking differently is Freud's legacy itself.

Every historian has informally an anthropology, without ever using the word.

And my interest in history was, and remains, very strong: what I wanted was to understand certain things better by understanding them psychoanalytically.

I am not comfortable with the life-against-death generalization that Freud makes; it strikes me as too convenient.

Since God is silent, man is his own master; he must live in a disenchanted world, submit everything to criticism, and make his own way.

I have always had a strong interest in history and finding out about the past can be remarkably helpful with working out the future, too.

I decided that what I really wanted to do was to make my writing in history deeper, if that's the right word to use. And that is what I did.

Freud, Jung thought, had been a great discoverer of facts about the mind, but far too inclined to leave the solid ground of "critical reason and common sense." Freud for his part criticized Jung for being gullible about occult phenomena and infatuated with Oriental religions; he viewed with sardonic and unmitigated skepticism Jung's defense of religious feelings as an integral element in mental health. For Freud, religion was a psychological need projected onto culture, the child's feeling of helplessness surviving in adults, to be analyzed rather than admired.

With the passage of years, not all of Dicken's readers remained infatuated with his pathos. One generation's sublimity became another generation's kitsch.

The ideas of theologians are refuted by their adversaries, the ideas of scientists are refuted by their followers.