Peter Gay Quotes

"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

"My definition of modernism took a while to develop."
-Peter Gay

"I am not comfortable with the life-against-death generalization that Freud makes; it strikes me as too convenient."
-Peter Gay

"I decided that what I really wanted to do was to make my writing in history deeper, if that's the right word to use. And that is what I did."
-Peter Gay

"What interests me, and has always interested me, has been modernism."
-Peter Gay

"Every historian has informally an anthropology, without ever using the word."
-Peter Gay

"My assumption is that fundamentally the picture of the human animal, as developed by Freud, is largely right."
-Peter Gay

"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