If you trace the history of Islamist terrorism, you see that its founders were great admirers of European fascism. They read the texts of European fascism, they quoted them in speeches and letters. This is not from the Koran - the Koran doesn't teach you how to repress people; there's nothing in there about women having to cover their faces, there's certainly nothing about suicide bombing.

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".

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

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 only successful revolution of this century is totalitarianism.

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

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.