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.

The conservatives want to revolutionize the world all at once. And that's a dangerous proposal.

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

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.

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.

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

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".