Peter Gay

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

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.

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.

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

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.