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.
BERNARD-HENRI LEVYGod is dead but my hair is perfect.
More Bernard-Henri Levy Quotes
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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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The euro is a great achievement. It’s a symbolic achievement. But, the European constitution was a missed opportunity.
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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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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 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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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 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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The only successful revolution of this century is totalitarianism.
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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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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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God is dead but my hair is perfect.
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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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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.
BERNARD-HENRI LEVY