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.

Europe needs to develop a sense of collective history - we need to write books from a European perspective, to teach it in schools as well.

God is dead but my hair is perfect.

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

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.

Europe has certainly lost confidence in itself. This was something that, when I was a young man, we never imagined would happen.