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

- Peter Gay

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 creatur…

- Peter Gay

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

- Peter Gay

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

- Peter Gay

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

- Peter Gay

And my interest in history was, and remains, very strong: what I wanted was to understand certain things better by understanding them psychoanalytica…

- 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

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

- Peter Gay

Freud, Jung thought, had been a great discoverer of facts about the mind, but far too inclined to leave the solid ground of "critical reason and comm…

- Peter Gay