The Bourgeois Experience Quotes

“Sheer stupidity — that much underrated force in history.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“The truth is that the angels of anxiety — those overpowering forces for change in politics, economics, science, morals, and social policy — were at the same time agents for self-confidence.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“Hysteria defied self-control; obsessional neurosis mimicked it.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“Democratic politics was many things, among them a kind of seduction, documenting once again the interplay of aggression with libido. It awakened and often gratified the electorate’s hostile impulses, or at the very least, its desire for aggressive self-assertion. At the same time, it yoked followers to their leaders to produce a community rife with erotic overtones. Love for one’s favorite politician was intensified by hatred for the opposition.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“Obviously, the history of the franchise is a history of anomalies.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“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.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“As researchers and experimenters, scholars and theorists, German academics — good bourgeois virtually all of them — made signal contributions to human mastery. But as citizens they failed to claim mastery over their own fate. The way they chose to confine their lives to their professional advancement was a kind of division of labor — scholarship to the scholar, politics to the politician. But it was also a fateful division of power.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“One did not have to be a Jesuit to recognize that to control the schools was to control the future.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“Defying its narrow name, what the late nineteenth century called the industrial revolution went far beyond creating modern industry; it altered out of all recognition commerce, banking, transport, communications, administration, medicine, the relations of men and women and employers and employees. It was a revolution in knowledge that the Victorian century would master more completely, and would need more urgently, than any of its predecessors.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“[S]ince humans find it hard to give up a pleasure already experienced, such a sacrifice might come easier if another pleasure was offered in replacement.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“If one could capture children, students, apprentices, even criminals, in the silken chains of guilt feelings, if one could fabricate submissive love for authority figures, the heavy artillery of harsh punishments could be profitably replaced by the subtler and cleaner weapons of control: psychological warfare. The bourgeois conscience was a fraud waiting to be unmasked. On this reading, the Victorian humanitarian style, anxious to bring pugnacity to heel, was only a cover for economic greed, political self-interest, and imperialistic lust for domination.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“There were colonial administrators, supremely practical men, who consciously fostered the technique of subduing the lust for violence by diverting it into innocuous sporting channels.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“Tumbling over one another, these new realities produced nervous responses. Stratagems of defense, partly unconscious, included regression from liberal open-mindedness, nostalgia for an idyllic past when the poor had doffed their caps to their better, fearful clinging to strict rules of conduct, and psychological denials that were derisively, and unhelpfully, called hypocrisy. [...] Still, if alarm had been unanimous, the calls for a return to the old days would have been irresistible. The truth is that the agents of anxiety — those overpowering forces for change in politics, economics, science, morals, and social policy — were at the same time agents of self confidence.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“The German word for “attack,” Angriff, exhibits its roots in the tactile act of grasping, of getting a grip on something, whether an enemy to be annihilated, a railroad network to be constructed, a symphony to be composed.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“But aggression has its constructive qualities as well.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“[H]umor has, among other duties, the task of controlling anxieties, of mastering threats, by increasing their distance and reducing their dimensions.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“The body of the ponderous scholarly exegesis that began to bather around Busch in his lifetime and picked up speed after his death is witness to the humorlessness of much writing about humor.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“When a society pretends to even a shred of civility — and in the bourgeois century, most societies did — it is hard to predict just where or when oppositional humor will overstep the bounds of propriety or of the law.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“Molière‘S great comic villains are perfect butts for the humorist’s lash.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“Well over a decade before he (Freud) assigned to aggression a stature equal in dignity, perhaps superior in power, to the libido, he divided what he called “tendentious jokes”, those with a point to make beyond sheer verbal felicity, into two categories: obscene and hostile. Here was, in embryo, the structural theory of the 1920s, a theory that treated the mind as a battleground between the forces of love and aggression, or, in his more grandiose formulation, of life and death.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“Certainly the psychological work done by wit and humor is heavily overdetermined. It may control, or salute, the sudden release of tension. It may express anxiety or alleviate it; bravado joking is a whistling past the graveyard of physical fear or social uneasiness. Humor may serve as a salutary act of regression — an agreeable holiday from frowning responsibility, a temporary retreat from earnestness that circumvents the punitive superego humans carry about with themselves.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“Just as each culture, it seems, has its favorite neurosis, so does each have its favorite impulsions to be amused.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“Laughter deriding others is only too often incense one burns at one’s own self-constructed altar, an altar one knows to be rickety.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“It is telling that common speech should link humor to such pugnacious acts as biting, slashing, cutting. Using the materials of its culture, humor offers splendid openings for the exercise — and the control — of aggression.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“The careers of nineteenth-century woman writers, then, make for an illuminating test case in the history of aggression — of attack, counterattack, and only too often, more or less pathetic surrender to self-serving male verdicts. They are illuminating, too, because it is virtually impossible to disentangle the constructive from the destructive elements in the progress of Victorian women in the literary profession.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“His portrait of a married couple — brazen male incompetence on one side, camera-shy female wisdom on the other — must have evoked in many men clusters of mental images, or vague memories, recalling the first and shaping love affair of their lives, with their mother. What Barrie thought every woman knew was something that most men knew, in their troubled unconscious.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“In 1845 — she (Elizabeth Barrett) was almost forty — she began corresponding with Robert Browning, and noted that what most people call love is really a kind of warfare, with one side enjoying all the strategic advantages. Again and again one sees "the growth of power on one side" and "the struggle against it, by means legal & illegal on the other." The best counterattack that women can mount is guerrilla warfare.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“A group of anxious gentlemen given to hysterics at sharp noises and bearing such telltale names as “Wumenheyter” and “Easyled” meet to counteract a “treasonable” recent women’s convention in Massachusetts. Their plan is to unite in an “effort to repel the proposed feminine aggression of their rights,” which will result in “universal decapitation of the men” and an “Amazonian government.” No castration (one might gloss the satire) without representation.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“The observation that women have identifiable preferences in reading matter was, of course, not original with Victorian entrepreneurs; since the eighteenth century, magazines written for men had angled for female readers with special departments. A few ephemera apart, the first periodical explicitly addressed to women.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“Still, hypocrisy — the practice of professing an ideal while consciously violating it — is rarely an adequate explanation for social ideologies. The blatant contradiction between flowery word painting about domestic goddess and the obstructions women faced every day is, rather, a clue to besetting problems below the threshold of awareness. The notion of female power radiating out from the hearth to the world, of recessive, modest mothers and wives determining the careers of men, was an obscure recognition of a fact in male lives. It exhibited, in distorted, almost unrecognizable form, men’s buried dependence on women, beginning with their mothers.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred