BERNARD-HENRI LEVY

It’s a little strange, this obsession with the flag. It’s incomprehensible to someone who comes from a country where the flag has, so to speak, disappeared, where any nostalgia and concern for it is a sign of an attachment to the past…

There is less Francophobia in your country than there is anti-Americanism in my country.

Maybe you should care sometimes about what foreign people tell you…. Maybe they have fresh eyes. Maybe we can tell Americans what other Americans think who no longer speak to each other.

When Europe was dominated by the two Black Birds of Fascism and Stalinism most European political leaders thought that you had to be for one and against the other, when the important thing was to be against both of these.

History is not just a story related by a fool.

Imagine what would have been the 20th century without intellectuals?

In the French war in Algeria, we had a Abu Ghraib every single week. But we did not have a Seymour Hirsh and a press like you did, and it was not much written in our press or by our intellectuals..

The fuse of racial hatred is long and winds through all of Europe.

You have a tendency to mix show with justice....You give a theater show to the press all over the world.

Anti-Americanism is a form of Fascism.

If we do not help the Libyan rebels, their blood will flow and it will be a stain on the French Flag.

I would dream of writing in a dictionary for the year 2000: 'Socialism, masculine noun, a cultural genre born in Paris in 1848, died in Paris in 1968.'

The French Socialist Party is not merely dying, but it is already dead.

You couldn’t truly fight terror while working with Pakistan, the greatest shelter for terrorists.

History usually repeats but it can be changed.

When you travel across America, when you take the trains and drive on its roads, when you visit cities in the middle of the country, the dismal—even rotting—state of American infrastructure is surprising.

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.

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

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

Islamic terrorists are new examples of an old problem with fascism.

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.