People always think that loyalty is laudable. People are always saying that we must remain faithful to tradition, to family, to our class, to our ideas. Of course not! That would be equivalent to zero brain activity. If you really want to think, to seek truth, to advance intellectually, you must turn your back on clichés, on preconceived ideas - even those belonging to your spiritual family. For an intellectual, his true duty is not to fidelity, but to infidelity.
God is dead but my hair is perfect.
If you trace the history of Islamist terrorism, you see that its founders were great admirers of European fascism. They read the texts of European fascism, they quoted them in speeches and letters. This is not from the Koran - the Koran doesn't teach you how to repress people; there's nothing in there about women having to cover their faces, there's certainly nothing about suicide bombing.
I don't really believe in dialogue; I am too Nietzschean for that. We need to have a warrior conception of philosophy.
The totalitarian state is not a force unleashed, the truth is in chains.
The Left is my family. And it is threatened by terrible demons, like differentialism. "differentialist Left" are people who have learned nothing about tolerance. Or justice. People who, hiding behind a backward sense of tolerance and justice, explain to us that we must accept all the actions of all civilizations, including the stoning of adulterous wives or the mutilation of little girls.
There is a true weakness in American thought today: their incapacity to be interested in the intelligence of evil.
Islamic terrorists are new examples of an old problem with fascism.
The only successful revolution of this century is totalitarianism.
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.
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.
For me, dressing is always a question of principle, respect, a sense of order, not to disguise myself, even in rotten places.
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.
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.
Europe has certainly lost confidence in itself. This was something that, when I was a young man, we never imagined would happen.
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".
The conservatives want to revolutionize the world all at once. And that's a dangerous proposal.
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.
I would hope that Europe always has a privileged relationship with the United States. The alternatives are not attractive.
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 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. 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.
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.
America creates myths by focusing a lot of energy on its history and using it - - not always, but sometimes - for constructive purposes.
The euro is a great achievement. It's a symbolic achievement. But, the European constitution was a missed opportunity.
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.
