The Cultivation of Hatred - the Bourgeois Experience

1 " 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 Cultivation of Hatred - the Bourgeois Experience - Victoria to Freud

2 " Hysteria defied self-control; obsessional neurosis mimicked it. "

― Peter Gay , The Cultivation of Hatred - the Bourgeois Experience - Victoria to Freud

3 " Sheer stupidity — that much underrated force in history. "

― Peter Gay , The Cultivation of Hatred - the Bourgeois Experience - Victoria to Freud

4 " 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 Cultivation of Hatred - the Bourgeois Experience - Victoria to Freud

5 " 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 Cultivation of Hatred - the Bourgeois Experience - Victoria to Freud

6 " Obviously, the history of the franchise is a history of anomalies. "

― Peter Gay , The Cultivation of Hatred - the Bourgeois Experience - Victoria to Freud

7 " 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 Cultivation of Hatred - the Bourgeois Experience - Victoria to Freud

8 " Hard feelings were bubbling just beneath the surface of British society. and they repeatedly erupted: with trade unions recruiting new members, strikes led to violent clashes and the beating of strikebreakers; brawls fueled by alcohol escalated into riots; Irishmen imported to do heavy labor in the factories or on the docks aroused vehement hostility, and Catholics were exposed to demagogic abuse sometimes followed by physical assaults. It was the people as attackers, not as victims, who troubled reformers in the great debate. "

― Peter Gay , The Cultivation of Hatred - the Bourgeois Experience - Victoria to Freud

9 " The issue that divided liberals and democrats was plain: if the consent of the governed is to be at all meaningful, if they are to weight the acts of their governors and join in the making of laws through their representatives in a legislature that is better than a charade, they must be rational creatures capable of rising above willful self-interest. Was it reasonable to demand disinterested restraint from day laborers and peasants doomed to lives of unending drudgery on the edge of starvation? Could human nature overcome illiteracy, exhaustion, indifference, the centuries-old habit of submissiveness punctuated only by riots? Could one fashion into competent citizens the holders of a litter property or small craftsmen who work with their hands, men who read, if they read at all, the Bible or some scandal sheet? "

― Peter Gay , The Cultivation of Hatred - the Bourgeois Experience - Victoria to Freud

10 " 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 Cultivation of Hatred - the Bourgeois Experience - Victoria to Freud

11 " 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 Cultivation of Hatred - the Bourgeois Experience - Victoria to Freud

12 " One did not have to be a Jesuit to recognize that to control the schools was to control the future. "

― Peter Gay , The Cultivation of Hatred - the Bourgeois Experience - Victoria to Freud

13 " 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 Cultivation of Hatred - the Bourgeois Experience - Victoria to Freud

14 " 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 Cultivation of Hatred - the Bourgeois Experience - Victoria to Freud

15 " 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 Cultivation of Hatred - the Bourgeois Experience - Victoria to Freud

16 " [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 Cultivation of Hatred - the Bourgeois Experience - Victoria to Freud

17 " Much as they feared democracy, they determined to shape it. Their motto became "Let us educate our new masters". "

― Peter Gay , The Cultivation of Hatred - the Bourgeois Experience - Victoria to Freud

18 " 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 Cultivation of Hatred - the Bourgeois Experience - Victoria to Freud

19 " But aggression has its constructive qualities as well. "

― Peter Gay , The Cultivation of Hatred - the Bourgeois Experience - Victoria to Freud

20 " 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 Cultivation of Hatred - the Bourgeois Experience - Victoria to Freud

The Cultivation of Hatred - the Bourgeois Experience - Victoria to Freud QUOTES