"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."
— Bernard-Henri Levy
"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."
— Bernard-Henri Levy
"God is dead but my hair is perfect."
— Bernard-Henri Levy
"There is a true weakness in American thought today: their incapacity to be interested in the intelligence of evil."
— Bernard-Henri Levy
"The totalitarian state is not a force unleashed, the truth is in chains."
— Bernard-Henri Levy
"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."
— Bernard-Henri Levy
"Islamic terrorists are new examples of an old problem with fascism."
— Bernard-Henri Levy
"The conservatives want to revolutionize the world all at once. And that's a dangerous proposal."
— Bernard-Henri Levy
"France is a country where thinking is supposed to be furtive, invisible, almost clandestine. France is a country of cliques and sects."
— Bernard-Henri Levy