For me, dressing is always a question of principle, respect, a sense of order, not to disguise myself, even in rotten places.

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

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.

The totalitarian state is not a force unleashed, the truth is in chains.

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".

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.

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.