Even Colombia – where the dead have no faces and literally cannot be counted. Theirs are minuscule lives moving toward imperceptible deaths. For me, it is the essence of tragedy.
BERNARD-HENRI LEVYFrance is a country where thinking is supposed to be furtive, invisible, almost clandestine. France is a country of cliques and sects.
More Bernard-Henri Levy Quotes
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The totalitarian state is not a force unleashed, the truth is in chains.
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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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Even if the Israel-Palestine question were solved – and I think and hope that one day soon it will be – this wouldn’t stop one person from becoming a terrorist.
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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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I would hope that Europe always has a privileged relationship with the United States. The alternatives are not attractive.
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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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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 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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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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There is a true weakness in American thought today: their incapacity to be interested in the intelligence of evil.
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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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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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Even if it doesn’t sound like it at first, that’s an identity that Europe can go out into the world with and take a leading role.
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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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France is a country where thinking is supposed to be furtive, invisible, almost clandestine. France is a country of cliques and sects.
BERNARD-HENRI LEVY