Quotes from Peter Gay

Defying its narrow name, what the late nineteenth century called the industrial revolution went far beyond creating modern industry; it altered out of all recognition commerce, banking, transport, communications, administration, medicine, the relations of men and women and employers and employees. It was a revolution in knowledge that the Victorian century would master more completely, and would need more urgently, than any of its predecessors.

One did not have to be a Jesuit to recognize that to control the schools was to control the future.

As researchers and experimenters, scholars and theorists, German academics — good bourgeois virtually all of them — made signal contributions to human mastery. But as citizens they failed to claim mastery over their own fate. The way they chose to confine their lives to their professional advancement was a kind of division of labor — scholarship to the scholar, politics to the politician. But it was also a fateful division of power.

His portrait of a married couple — brazen male incompetence on one side, camera-shy female wisdom on the other — must have evoked in many men clusters of mental images, or vague memories, recalling the first and shaping love affair of their lives, with their mother. What Barrie thought every woman knew was something that most men knew, in their troubled unconscious.

The body of the ponderous scholarly exegesis that began to bather around Busch in his lifetime and picked up speed after his death is witness to the humorlessness of much writing about humor.

H]umor has, among other duties, the task of controlling anxieties, of mastering threats, by increasing their distance and reducing their dimensions.

parted from Freud, aware how much Freud disliked emotional displays, he spoke lightly about travel plans. Freud, Sachs records, understood

commented on Freud's unvarying courtesy: he inquired after others, and never showed signs of impatience or irritability. He would not be infantilized by his disease. On August 13, his nephew Harry

Much as they feared democracy, they determined to shape it. Their motto became "Let us educate our new masters".

He commented to me," Schur remembers, "how fortunate he was, that he has found so many valuable friends." Anna had just left the room, which

read, and his last book was Balzac's mysterious tale of the magical shrinking skin, La Peau de chagrin.