Quotes by Peter Gay

• Every historian has informally an anthropology, without ever using the word.
• My assumption is that fundamentally the picture of the human animal, as developed by Freud, is largely right.
• And my interest in history was, and remains, very strong: what I wanted was to understand certain things better by understanding them psychoanalytically.
• 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.
• People seem to forget that one reason they are now thinking differently is Freud's legacy itself.
• My definition of modernism took a while to develop.
• 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.