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”.
BERNARD-HENRI LEVYThe euro is a great achievement. It’s a symbolic achievement. But, the European constitution was a missed opportunity.
More Bernard-Henri Levy Quotes
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In general, Europeans need to get a wider perspective on the problem of Islamism.
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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 euro is a great achievement. It’s a symbolic achievement. But, the European constitution was a missed opportunity.
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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.
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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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Anti-Americanism, by which I mean a hatred for America as such-its transformation into a metaphysical category, which incarnates all the evil in the world-is one of fascism’s favorite themes.
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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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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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You can be horrified by the state of the prisons, the misery in certain neighborhoods of its cities, or their level of poverty.
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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 don’t really believe in dialogue; I am too Nietzschean for that. We need to have a warrior conception of philosophy.
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The only successful revolution of this century is totalitarianism.
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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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The terrorists exist, and I think we must speak to them, not to establish a dialogue-since for serious terrorists that is unfortunately out of the question – but to learn how their brains work, to be better able to fight them.
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I am 60, and I am as much an internationalist as when I was younger, when I was a Marxist-Leninist. Internationalism is one of the rare pieces of that heritage to which I remain loyal. That is Barack Obama’s strength.
BERNARD-HENRI LEVY