Peter Gay

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

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

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.

We define ourselves as intelligent. That's odd, because we're doing the definition - We're creating our own definition and saying, 'We are intelligent!'

From the outset, MoMA followed the Bauhaus's strict prohibition against design that even hinted at the decorative, a prejudice that skewed the pioneering museum's view of Modernism for decades.