“I would hope that Europe always has a privileged relationship with the United States. The alternatives are not attractive.”

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.

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.

There is a true weakness in American thought today: their incapacity to be interested in the intelligence of evil.

In general, Europeans need to get a wider perspective on the problem of Islamism.

God is dead but my hair is perfect.

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.

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.

Look at writer and political theorist Charles Maurras in France. The philosopher Martin Heidegger in Germany. The radical Islamists of today!

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.

I really like the United State, its relationship to space and time, its interest in mobility, its cosmopolitanism.

America creates myths by focusing a lot of energy on its history and using it – – not always, but sometimes – for constructive purposes.

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.

France is a country where thinking is supposed to be furtive, invisible, almost clandestine. France is a country of cliques and sects.

The euro is a great achievement. It’s a symbolic achievement. But, the European constitution was a missed opportunity.

The only successful revolution of this century is totalitarianism.

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”.

[Chemical weapons] isn’t about what the United States believe in, it’s about the reality that we have, and this reality, we own it, we don’t have to discuss it.

The United States accused Syria, and because you accused you have to bring evidence [of chemical weapons], this first of all. We have to find evidences when we are there.

A transplanted Irishman, German, Englishman is an American in one generation. A transplanted African is not one in five!

Craig Nelson who is an actor and is in a show called Coach in the United States. We began to do some improvisational stuff and we used to get laughs and things.

The United States and Mexico are trapped – economically, culturally, politically and because of drug crime – in the same continent.

I would like to be the first ambassador to the United States from the United States.

I will fight in the United States Senate this year to fund a servicing mission to Hubble by 2008, a mission that would potentially increase Hubbles power and efficiency by a factor of 10 and allow us to look back almost to the beginning of the universe.

In the United States, they always talk about subtitles, about chapters in a book without taking the main title of the book. They talk about a subtitle in a chapter and if you ask them about the headline, the main title, they say they do not know.