I don’t really believe in dialogue; I am too Nietzschean for that. We need to have a warrior conception of philosophy.
BERNARD-HENRI LEVYWhy should an intellectual have to renounce the pleasures of life? I am not a hermit. I am a man of flesh and blood. In fact, if you look at my name in French, that schizophrenia, that aspiration to several lives is contained in my name. Lévy is also les vies – “the lives”.
More Bernard-Henri Levy Quotes
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For me, dressing is always a question of principle, respect, a sense of order, not to disguise myself, even in rotten places.
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I would hope that Europe always has a privileged relationship with the United States. The alternatives are not attractive.
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The euro is a great achievement. It’s a symbolic achievement. But, the European constitution was a missed opportunity.
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France is a country where thinking is supposed to be furtive, invisible, almost clandestine. France is a country of cliques and sects.
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I work even when I am on vacation. You know that line by Stéphane Mallarmé, “All earthly existence must ultimately be contained in a book”? I am the kind of person who finds life interesting only if it is translated into writing, if it is parsed into words.
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God is dead but my hair is perfect.
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The European Union should not be prescribing an identity. We know what that’s like, when a government tells its people how it should look; what it should be doing. That’s the first step towards totalitarianism.
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I reject the idea that there is some sort of existential “clash of civilizations.” I am an interventionist, but not a militarist. War should always be a last resort.
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Why should an intellectual have to renounce the pleasures of life? I am not a hermit. I am a man of flesh and blood. In fact, if you look at my name in French, that schizophrenia, that aspiration to several lives is contained in my name. Lévy is also les vies – “the lives”.
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A politician has finally understood that politics is not only about the closing of a mine in Ohio-it is also about the will to reach out, to embrace the world of today’s young Americans. That way, young Americans may eventually reconcile with politics.
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I definitely don’t agree with that sort of rhetoric from the United States – this idea that all the major conflicts of our age need to be solved militarily.
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The totalitarian state is not a force unleashed, the truth is in chains.
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Europe needs to develop a sense of collective history – we need to write books from a European perspective, to teach it in schools as well.
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There is a true weakness in American thought today: their incapacity to be interested in the intelligence of evil.
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Each time a Palestinian or an Israeli dies, it is terrible. But they have the right to have a funeral, to be buried, to have a place in the memory of the survivors. And then you have these other places – Darfur, Rwanda.
BERNARD-HENRI LEVY






