Quotes from Peter Gay

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.

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.

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.

My definition of modernism took a while to develop.

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

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.

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

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

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.

What does the ideal Aryan look like? As tall as Goebbels, as slim as Göring, as blond as Hitler.

If my father could not abide Christianity, he had no objections to individual Christians.

But we were Germans; the gangsters who had taken control of the country were not Germany—we were.

But aggression has its constructive qualities as well.

The careers of nineteenth-century woman writers, then, make for an illuminating test case in the history of aggression — of attack, counterattack, and only too often, more or less pathetic surrender to self-serving male verdicts. They are illuminating, too, because it is virtually impossible to disentangle the constructive from the destructive elements in the progress of Victorian women in the literary profession.

mixing cajolery with lies, threats, and violence. The Reichstag fire provided them with apparently good reasons for pushing through an emergency decree

In 1845 — she (Elizabeth Barrett) was almost forty — she began corresponding with Robert Browning, and noted that what most people call love is really a kind of warfare, with one side enjoying all the strategic advantages. Again and again one sees the growth of power on one side and the struggle against it, by means legal & illegal on the other. The best counterattack that women can mount is guerrilla warfare.

It was as though, by concealing woman behind the veils of her enigmatic nature, men could evade the unpalatable truth that their mother was a sexual being. Proclaiming woman to be a dark problem, men were happily dispensed from searching for a solution.

In the course of these pages, I have called the idea of the mysterious woman a cliché, and so it was. But, like other clichés, it has a certain psychological reality.

Hitler had ordered a bloodbath among old followers and imagined rivals, some of them his lieutenants for years. The most spectacular victim of the purge was Ernst Röhm, head of the brown-shirted S.A., who, with other longtime political allies, was shot to death that day or the next.

It reduced the press, we have seen, to a lackey's docility until the media essentially served only to distribute government handouts and the kind of cringing propaganda they called editorials.

sullen earnestness, their authoritarianism, their self-conceit, and their vicious political ideas.

There were colonial administrators, supremely practical men, who consciously fostered the technique of subduing the lust for violence by diverting it into innocuous sporting channels.

The notion that scientific truth directly fosters moral goodness — a legacy of gifted but in this respect misguided amateurs of science like Diderot and Goethe — was receding in the nineteenth century before positivistic procedures which sharply differentiated facts from values.