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.
BERNARD-HENRI LEVYThe 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.
BERNARD-HENRI LEVYI would hope that Europe always has a privileged relationship with the United States. The alternatives are not attractive.
BERNARD-HENRI LEVYGod is dead but my hair is perfect.
BERNARD-HENRI LEVYI 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 LEVYFrance is a country where thinking is supposed to be furtive, invisible, almost clandestine. France is a country of cliques and sects.
BERNARD-HENRI LEVYI 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.
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”.
BERNARD-HENRI LEVYI really like the United State, its relationship to space and time, its interest in mobility, its cosmopolitanism.
BERNARD-HENRI LEVYI 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.
BERNARD-HENRI LEVYEurope needs to develop a sense of collective history – we need to write books from a European perspective, to teach it in schools as well.
BERNARD-HENRI LEVYAmerica creates myths by focusing a lot of energy on its history and using it – – not always, but sometimes – for constructive purposes.
BERNARD-HENRI LEVYEven 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.
BERNARD-HENRI LEVYEven 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 LEVYA 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.
BERNARD-HENRI LEVYAnti-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.
BERNARD-HENRI LEVYThe 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.
BERNARD-HENRI LEVY