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.
BERNARD-HENRI LEVYLook at writer and political theorist Charles Maurras in France. The philosopher Martin Heidegger in Germany. The radical Islamists of today!
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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There is a true weakness in American thought today: their incapacity to be interested in the intelligence of evil.
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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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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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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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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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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 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.
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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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In general, Europeans need to get a wider perspective on the problem of Islamism.
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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 really like the United State, its relationship to space and time, its interest in mobility, its cosmopolitanism.
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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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God is dead but my hair is perfect.
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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.
BERNARD-HENRI LEVY