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

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.

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

The only successful revolution of this century is totalitarianism.

I would hope that Europe always has a privileged relationship with the United States. The alternatives are not attractive.

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

Each time a Palestinian or an Israeli dies, it is terrible. But they have the right to have a funeral, to be buried, to have a place in the memory of the survivors. And then you have these other places - Darfur, Rwanda, even Colombia - where the dead have no faces and literally cannot be counted. Theirs are minuscule lives moving toward imperceptible deaths. For me, it is the essence of tragedy.