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Quote by Peter Gay

“The human mind hungers for reality; except for the largely encapsulated id, which is the depository of the raw drives and of deeply repressed material, the other institutions of the mind, the ego and the superego, draw continuously and liberally on the culture in which they subsist, develop, succeed, and fail. While the mind presents the world with its needs, the world gives the mind its grammar, wishes their vocabulary, anxieties their object.”

Quote by Peter Gay

Book:The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred
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The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

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Author

Peter Gay
Peter Gay

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. more

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“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.”

SimplicityUncertaintyBigotryBourgeoisSimplificationSocial RealityUnconscious Needs
Book:Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud
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“Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property. I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves.”

SocialismHypocrisyBourgeoisClass StruggleClass WarfareCommunists1960Frequently Misquoted
Book:America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction
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“Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this, they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. When the economists say the present-day relations--the relations of bourgeois production--are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any. There has been history, since there were institutions of feudalism, and in these institutions of feudalism we find quite different relations of production from those of bourgeois society, which the economists try to pass off as natural and, as such, eternal.”

ReligionHistoryPerspectiveEconomicsInstitutionsBourgeoisMarketProduction
Book:The Poverty of Philosophy
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“The Constitution, the National Assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue and the red republicans, the heroes of Africa, the thunder from the platform, the sheet lightning of the daily press, the entire literature, the political names and the intellectual reputations, the civil law and penal code, the liberté, égalité, fraternité and the second of May 1852—all have vanished like a phantasmagoria before the spell of a man whom even his enemies do not make out to be a magician. Universal suffrage seems to have survived only for a moment, in order that with its own hand it may make its last will and testament before the eyes of all the world and declare in the name of the people itself: Everything that exists has this much worth, that it will perish.”

RevolutionConstitutionSocialismFranceFascismDictatorshipDictatorMagicianMonarchyBourgeoisAuthoritarianismSuffrageRepublicansDynastySpellPressNapoleonAuthoritarianThird RepublicCoup D EtatFrench RepublicBrumaireCipollaLouis BonaparteMario And The MagicianMountebank
Book:The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
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“That night, I hated father. He smelt of cabbage. There was cigarette ash all over his trousers. His untidy moustache was yellower and viler than ever with nicotine, and he took no notice of me. He simply sat there in his ugly arm-chair, his eyes half closed, brooding on the Lord knows what. I hated him. I hated his moustache. I even hated the smoke that drifted from his mouth and hung in the stale air above his head. And when my mother came through the door and asked me whether I had seen her spectacles, I hated her too. I hated the clothes she wore; tasteless and fussy. I hated them deeply. I hated something I had never noticed before; it was the way the heels of her shoes were worn away on their outside edges - not badly, but appreciably. It looked mean to me, slatternly, and horribly human. I hated her for being human - like father. She began to nag me about her glasses and the thread-bare condition of the elbows of my jacket, and suddenly I threw my book down. The room was unbearable. I felt suffocated. I suddenly realised that I must get away. I had lived with these two people for nearly twenty-three years. I had been born in the room immediately overhead. Was this the life for a young man? To spend his evenings watching the smoke drift out of his father's mouth and stain that decrepit old moustache, year after year - to watch the worn-away edges of my mother's heels - the dark-brown furniture and the familiar stains on the chocolate-coloured carpet? I would go away; I would shake off the dark, smug mortality of the place. I would forgo my birthright. What of my father's business into which I would step at his death? What of it? To hell with it. ("Same Time, Same Place")”

BourgeoisBourgeoisiePetulance
Book:Weird Shadows From Beyond: An Anthology of Strange Stories
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