Peter Gay Quotes

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

Peter Gay

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

Peter Gay

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

Peter Gay

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

Peter Gay

#5. 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.

Peter Gay

#6. 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.

Peter Gay

#7. 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.

Peter Gay

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

Peter Gay

#9. 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.

Peter Gay

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

Peter Gay

#11. 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.

Peter Gay

#12. My definition of modernism took a while to develop.

Peter Gay