The euro is a great achievement. It’s a symbolic achievement. But, the European constitution was a missed opportunity.
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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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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The totalitarian state is not a force unleashed, the truth is in chains.
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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 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.
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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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I really like the United State, its relationship to space and time, its interest in mobility, its cosmopolitanism.
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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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Look at writer and political theorist Charles Maurras in France. The philosopher Martin Heidegger in Germany. The radical Islamists of today!
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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 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.
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In general, Europeans need to get a wider perspective on the problem of Islamism.
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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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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.
BERNARD-HENRI LEVY