The Empire and the Five Kings Quotes

“When any of us surfs the Web, when we do a search or make a purchase, or even when a Turkish, Egyptian, or Russian dissident communicates via Skype or FaceTime, we leave behind us fingerprints that Big Brother will use in any way that pleases him, whether it is to cash in or clamp down.”
― Bernard-Henri Lévy, The Empire and the Five Kings: America's Abdication and the Fate of the World

“Trump and Zuckerberg, though they probably agree on nothing, are the two blades of a pair of scissors that is cutting the fabric of truth to ribbons.”
― Bernard-Henri Lévy, The Empire and the Five Kings: America's Abdication and the Fate of the World

“And two reasons explain why the Soviet Union could not have won that victory and why, moreover, it did not really seek it. The first is related to its early collusion with the enemy. How can you be awarded the trophy for anti-Nazism when you began by sealing a pact with Hitler? When you believed so strongly in this pact that you refused to recognize its annulment until the very last minute? And when neither the war that eventually erupted, nor the horrifying bloodbath that it inflicted on your people, nor the fight to the death of two rival titans, Hitler and Stalin, cannot suppress the feeling of an unspoken but irrevocable complicity between the proletarian spirit of Moscow and the “proletaryan” spirit of Berlin?”
― Bernard-Henri Lévy, The Empire and the Five Kings: America's Abdication and the Fate of the World

“Links against chains. Links of solidarity versus chains of servitude. The brotherhood of the shaken against the unholy alliance of cold-blooded monsters and frauds.”
― Bernard-Henri Lévy, The Empire and the Five Kings: America's Abdication and the Fate of the World

“I side with the West because there is an abyss between totalitarianism and democracy, an obvious fact of which we must never lose sight.”
― Bernard-Henri Lévy, The Empire and the Five Kings: America's Abdication and the Fate of the World

“A time is coming that is no longer the time that emerged from the death of communism, from the triumph of liberal values, and from the pronounced “end of history,” an ending to which I never subscribed but that was beginning to take on a truly sinister face.”
― Bernard-Henri Lévy, The Empire and the Five Kings: America's Abdication and the Fate of the World

“the Turks, Iranians, Russians, Chinese, and the Sunni caliphs—the five powers bent on revising the international order and preparing to show their hand (each at its own pace) in challenge to the United States and Europe, have the distinctive characteristic of being custodians of the most legendary examples of empire and of being, right up to the present, passionately inhabited by this imperial memory.”
― Bernard-Henri Lévy, The Empire and the Five Kings: America's Abdication and the Fate of the World

“Venezuela, a state that is a calamity for Venezuelans and a friend of the most shunned regimes (Pakistan, of course, along with North Korea, Iran, Russia, and others just as odious), while also being the architect of the farcical “Bolivarian alliance.”
― Bernard-Henri Lévy, The Empire and the Five Kings: America's Abdication and the Fate of the World

“In this new world, which seems made to lead not to a beautiful book but to a gallery of Instagram selfies, we collect ourselves, getting high on narcissism repeated ad infinitum, and we reign over a world nearly stripped of its substance.”
― Bernard-Henri Lévy, The Empire and the Five Kings: America's Abdication and the Fate of the World

“reassembling the last pieces of the puzzle, I discovered something almost worse than nonintervention, blindness, and betrayal: when America decided to react, when it seemed to take the measure of the rout that it was inflicting on itself and finally spoke up, however timidly, its words fell flat and were ignored.”
― Bernard-Henri Lévy, The Empire and the Five Kings: America's Abdication and the Fate of the World

“there is a suicidal weakness in the relationship between the democracies and war; that our first reflex, when the alarm sounds and well-armed and determined adversaries trample our values underfoot, is to do nothing at all.”
― Bernard-Henri Lévy, The Empire and the Five Kings: America's Abdication and the Fate of the World

“There exists in the Middle East a state, Syria, that emerged from the decisions of a Franco-British diplomatic duo whose job was to divide the spoils of the Ottoman Empire.”
― Bernard-Henri Lévy, The Empire and the Five Kings: America's Abdication and the Fate of the World

“It is also important to recall the role that the digitization of the world has played in the global offensive against the will to seek and find truth.”
― Bernard-Henri Lévy, The Empire and the Five Kings: America's Abdication and the Fate of the World

“And my dream is to recapture the art of loving and of being seduced; the habit of the stroll and of reading in cafes; the practice, endorsed by Dante and Baudelaire, of building, repairing, and living in cities; the exhilaration of a speech (at their purest depths, the languages of Europe have never been anything other than this) that no sooner encounters the desert than it discovers the delight of filling it with song; the taste for a beautiful "now" that, when it offers itself for the taking, is an almost perfect treasure, as the grasshopper might have replied to the ant in the fable; in sum, the art and the inclination that were the voice, the flavour, and the colour of Europe.”
― Bernard-Henri Lévy, The Empire and the Five Kings: America's Abdication and the Fate of the World

“I was expressing the fear that America could become just another country, bigger than most, more powerful, grappling with myths that were a little more outsized than the others, but all in all a country like another, with a president who, seventy-five years ago and in the grip of the original America First, might not have waged war against Nazism.”
― Bernard-Henri Lévy, The Empire and the Five Kings: America's Abdication and the Fate of the World

“The great crocodiles of the Bosporus, the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Yangtze, and the Volga are squaring off against Little Boy; in the wildest of their schemes, they see themselves taking him down in one bite.”
― Bernard-Henri Lévy, The Empire and the Five Kings: America's Abdication and the Fate of the World