Peter Gay Quotes

Peter Gay — American Historian born on June 20, 1923,

Peter Gay was an American historian, educator and author. He was Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and former director of the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers. Gay received the American Historical Association's Award for Scholarly Distinction in 2004. He authored over 25 books, including The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, a multi-volume award winner; Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider, a bestseller; and the widely translated Freud: A Life for Our Time... (wikipedia)

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.

My definition of modernism took a while to develop.

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

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.