“France is a country where thinking is supposed to be furtive, invisible, almost clandestine. France is a country of cliques and sects.”

There is a true weakness in American thought today: their incapacity to be interested in the intelligence of evil.

In general, Europeans need to get a wider perspective on the problem of Islamism.

I would hope that Europe always has a privileged relationship with the United States. The alternatives are not attractive.

God is dead but my hair is perfect.

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.

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.

Look at writer and political theorist Charles Maurras in France. The philosopher Martin Heidegger in Germany. The radical Islamists of today!

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.

I really like the United State, its relationship to space and time, its interest in mobility, its cosmopolitanism.

America creates myths by focusing a lot of energy on its history and using it – – not always, but sometimes – for constructive purposes.

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.

The euro is a great achievement. It’s a symbolic achievement. But, the European constitution was a missed opportunity.

The only successful revolution of this century is totalitarianism.

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”.

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.

I would sooner want a strong partnership with the United States – even with (US President George W.) Bush, who I think is the worst president in a long, long time. I would sooner want a friendship with Bush than with (Russian President Vladimir) Putin.

Our disputants put me in mind of the cuttlefish that, when he is unable to extricate himself, blackens the water about him till he becomes invisible.

Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination

I had that. I could almost feel the miles between us shrinking, as if we were at two ends of some invisible elastic thread.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

Most days now his loss is a part of her, an awkward weight she carries around, invisible to everyone else, subtly altering the way she moves through the day. But today, the Anniversary of the day he died, is a day when all bets are off.

I live, but live to die: and, living, see nothing to make death hateful, save an innate clinging, a loathsome and yet all invincible instinct of life, which I abhor, as I despise myself, yet cannot overcome – and so I live. Would I had never lived!

I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the invisible hand which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago.