America creates myths by focusing a lot of energy on its history and using it - - not always, but sometimes - for constructive purposes.
Bernard-Henri LevyThere is a true weakness in American thought today: their incapacity to be interested in the intelligence of evil.
Bernard-Henri LevyPeople 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 clichรฉs, on preconceived ideas - even those belonging to your spiritual family. For an intellectual, his true duty is not to fidelity, but to infidelity.
Bernard-Henri LevyWhy 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. Lรฉvy is also les vies - "the lives".
Bernard-Henri LevyI don't really believe in dialogue; I am too Nietzschean for that. We need to have a warrior conception of philosophy.
Bernard-Henri LevyThe 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.
Bernard-Henri Levy