Quotes from Peter Gay

It is telling that common speech should link humor to such pugnacious acts as biting, slashing, cutting. Using the materials of its culture, humor offers splendid openings for the exercise — and the control — of aggression.

Laughter deriding others is only too often incense one burns at one's own self-constructed altar, an altar one knows to be rickety.

S]ince humans find it hard to give up a pleasure already experienced, such a sacrifice might come easier if another pleasure was offered in replacement.

Just as each culture, it seems, has its favorite neurosis, so does each have its favorite impulsions to be amused.

Certainly the psychological work done by wit and humor is heavily overdetermined. It may control, or salute, the sudden release of tension. It may express anxiety or alleviate it; bravado joking is a whistling past the graveyard of physical fear or social uneasiness. Humor may serve as a salutary act of regression — an agreeable holiday from frowning responsibility, a temporary retreat from earnestness that circumvents the punitive superego humans carry about with themselves.

The human mind hungers for reality; except for the largely encapsulated id, which is the depository of the raw drives and of deeply repressed material, the other institutions of the mind, the ego and the superego, draw continuously and liberally on the culture in which they subsist, develop, succeed, and fail. While the mind presents the world with its needs, the world gives the mind its grammar, wishes their vocabulary, anxieties their object.

Cotton Mather lusted all his life for the presidency of Harvard, a post his father had held, and which the son affected to despise, especially after others were chosen; he was a prig and a meddler; an unscrupulous ideologue and a windy orator; a scribbler who praised simplicity in flowery circumlocutions, so anxious to see his production in print that it might be said of him, with little fear of exaggeration, that he would rather lose his soul than misplace a manuscript.

Well over a decade before he (Freud) assigned to aggression a stature equal in dignity, perhaps superior in power, to the libido, he divided what he called "tendentious jokes", those with a point to make beyond sheer verbal felicity, into two categories: obscene and hostile . Here was, in embryo, the structural theory of the 1920s, a theory that treated the mind as a battleground between the forces of love and aggression, or, in his more grandiose formulation, of life and death.

Molière'S great comic villains are perfect butts for the humorist's lash.

True, nineteenth-century diaries and letters offer scattered evidence of wives governing, even bullying, their husbands. They did so commanding a varied repertory of techniques that included tears, hysterical seizures, and ostentatious displays of swooning vulnerability. In that weakness there was indeed strength.

the Enlightenment has been held responsible for the evils of the modern age, and much scorn has been directed at its supposed superficial rationalism, foolish optimism, and irresponsible Utopianism.

While the Enlightenment was a family of philosophers, it was something more as well: it was a cultural climate, a world in which the philosophers acted, from which they noisily rebelled and quietly drew many of their ideas, and on which they attempted to impose their program.

Both as unique event and as linked to others, an experience is thus more than a naked wish or a casual perception; it is an organization of passionate demands, persistent ways of seeing, and objective realities that will not be denied.

The Enlightenment may be summoned up in two words: criticism and power.

Life is a shipwreck but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.

The true hypocrite knows what he is doing, and does it to his own advantage. The unconscious hypocrite is simply man in civilization.

Freud never questioned the powerful participation of objective realities in the very constitution of human experience. Love, as he put it late in life, seeks objects. So does hatred. And those objects are external, not internal, agents of experience.

Sheer stupidity — that much underrated force in history.

The truth is that the angels of anxiety — those overpowering forces for change in politics, economics, science, morals, and social policy — were at the same time agents for self-confidence.

Hysteria defied self-control; obsessional neurosis mimicked it.

The austere empiricism and scholarly imagination of the Warburg style were the very antithesis of the brutal anti-intellectualism and vulgar mysticism threatening to barbarize German culture in the 1920s; this was Weimar at its best.

Excellence was the best revenge.

Obviously, the history of the franchise is a history of anomalies.

When a society pretends to even a shred of civility — and in the bourgeois century, most societies did — it is hard to predict just where or when oppositional humor will overstep the bounds of propriety or of the law.