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.

I decided that what I really wanted to do was to make my writing in history deeper, if that’s the right word to use. And that is what I did.

The unmeasured hopes and fears of middle-class sufferers were often a none-too-subtle kind of transference. They invested the physician with all the attributes of a caring, all-knowing father, almost a manufactured deity, only to be disappointed over and over again. With them, expectations of the physician’s omnipotence alternated with contempt for his impotence, and they irrationally idolized or irrationally execrated him.

Freud never questioned the powerful participation of objective realities in the very constitution of human experience. Love, as he put it late in life, seeks objects. So does hatred. And those objects are external, not internal, agents of experience.

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.

The true hypocrite knows what he is doing, and does it to his own advantage. The unconscious hypocrite is simply man in civilization.

With the passage of years, not all of Dicken’s readers remained infatuated with his pathos. One generation’s sublimity became another generation’s kitsch.

The austere empiricism and scholarly imagination of the Warburg style were the very antithesis of the brutal anti-intellectualism and vulgar mysticism threatening to barbarize German culture in the 1920s; this was Weimar at its best.

Sheer stupidity – that much underrated force in history.

Hysteria defied self-control; obsessional neurosis mimicked it.