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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

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More quotes by Bernard-Henri Levy

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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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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.
Bernard-Henri Levy
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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 would hope that Europe always has a privileged relationship with the United States. The alternatives are not attractive.
Bernard-Henri Levy
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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.
Bernard-Henri Levy
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The totalitarian state is not a force unleashed, the truth is in chains.
Bernard-Henri Levy
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In general, Europeans need to get a wider perspective on the problem of Islamism. 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.
Bernard-Henri Levy
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The conservatives want to revolutionize the world all at once. And that's a dangerous proposal.
Bernard-Henri Levy
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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.
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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.
Bernard-Henri Levy
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When you believe in what you are doing, when you are seeking justice for the killing of Daniel Pearl, when you want to alert public opinion to the plight of the massacred people of Darfur, or in the recently martyred former Soviet republic Georgia, it makes more sense to use the media than to work in silence.
Bernard-Henri Levy
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Islamic terrorists are new examples of an old problem with fascism.
Bernard-Henri Levy
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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.
Bernard-Henri Levy
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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.
Bernard-Henri Levy
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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.
Bernard-Henri Levy
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There is a true weakness in American thought today: their incapacity to be interested in the intelligence of evil.
Bernard-Henri Levy
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For me, dressing is always a question of principle, respect, a sense of order, not to disguise myself, even in rotten places.
Bernard-Henri Levy
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The only successful revolution of this century is totalitarianism.
Bernard-Henri Levy