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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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It’s true that in France there is always this ridiculous complex about money. Money is cursed, shameful, money disqualifies you . . . In America, even though it is a Protestant country, it’s the opposite.
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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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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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God is dead but my hair is perfect.
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America creates myths by focusing a lot of energy on its history and using it – – not always, but sometimes – for constructive purposes.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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I would hope that Europe always has a privileged relationship with the United States. The alternatives are not attractive.
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In general, Europeans need to get a wider perspective on the problem of Islamism.
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The only successful revolution of this century is totalitarianism.
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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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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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