Quotes from Pascal Bruckner

The obsession with security at any price petrifies us, and we increase our fear by trying to eliminate risk. That is what is ridiculous about the great outcries in the media: we wake up in order to demand more passivity, a better protected life. The challenge is not only to decrease the amount of space the media devote to hazards but also to increase our ability to resist misfortunes. To augment our endurance rather than our panic.

Seeking to eliminate pain nonetheless puts it at the heart of the system. As a result, today we suffer from not wanting to suffer just as one can make oneself ill by trying to be perfectly healthy. Furthermore, we now tell ourselves a strange fable about a society completely devoted to hedonism, and for which everything becomes an irritation, a torture. Unhappiness is not only unhappiness; it is, worse yet, a failure to be happy.

In the eighteenth century, historians tell us, 'valentinage,' from which Valentine's Day was derived, allowed wives in northern France to make love, on a few days each year and with the knowledge of their husbands, with a 'valentine' of their choosing.

As good heirs of the Bible, we think that a great misfortune necessarily follows a great infraction. In this respect the intellectual caste, in our world, is the penitential class par excellence, continuing the role of the clergy under the Old Regime. We have to call its members what they are: officials of original sin.

The average European, whether male or female, is extremely sensitive, always ready to shoulder the blame for the poverty of Africa or Asia, to sorrow over the world's problems, to assume responsibility for them, always ready to ask what Europeans can do for the South rather than asking what the South could do for itself.

A whole intellectual intercourse is established: clerks are appointed to maintain it like the ancient guardians of the sacred flame and issue permits to think and speak.

However, its ultimate motivation is fanatics' hostility to the principle of an open society in which formal equality is recognized for everyone.

Where there are no visible conflicts, there is no freedom," Montesquieu said.

However, its ultimate motivation is fanatics' hostility to the principle of an open society in which formal equality is recognized for everyone. It is our existence as such that is intolerable for them.

Europe got over the loss of its colonies much more quickly than the colonies got over their loss of Europe.