Peter Gay Quotes

Professor

Peter Gay was an American historian and cultural critic, born on June 20, 1923, and died on May 12, 2015. He is renowned for his extensive research in the cultural history of 18th-century Europe, and his works have had a profound impact on subsequent generations.

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All Bourgeois Interest Able Children Culture Infatuated Modernism Psychological Reason Strong Wanted Accomplishment Adults Adversaries Aggression Animal Anthropology Assumption Bigotry Boon

Famous Peter Gay Quotes

“The need to live by secure, sharply etched classifications is buried deep in the human mind and one of its earliest demands; simplicity allays anxieties by defeating discriminations. Real situations are rarely clear-cut, real feelings often nests of ambivalence. This is something the adult learns to recognize and to tolerate, if he is fortunate; it is a strenuous insight from which he will regress at the first opportunity. That is why the liberal temper, which taught men to live with uncertainties and ambiguities, the most triumphant achievement of nineteenth-century culture, was so vulnerable to the assaults of cruder views of the world, to bigotry, chauvinism, and other coarse and simplistic classifications. "Every society," wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in one of his most brilliant aphorisms, "has the tendency to degrade and, as it were, to starve out, its adversaries—at least in its perception." The criminal, he thought, was one victim of such a regressive process; so was the Jew. And "among artists, the 'philistine and bourgeois' becomes a caricature." And artists, the avant-gardes, Nietzsche might have added, only set the tone for the wider culture. Class consciousness, which emerged fitfully and then more and more fully and aggressively towards the end of the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth century, enshrined such a caricature: a mixture and social reality and unconscious needs.”

Simplicity Uncertainty Bigotry Bourgeois Simplification Social Reality Unconscious Needs

Book:Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud

Source: Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud