Saturday, July 21, 2007

Quote du Jour: The French Think Too Much

Via the New York Times, apparently France's new right-wing president Nicolas Sarkozy and his finance minister Christine Lagarde have decided their fellow citizens think too much.

“France is a country that thinks,” she told the National Assembly. “There is hardly an ideology that we haven’t turned into a theory. We have in our libraries enough to talk about for centuries to come. This is why I would like to tell you: Enough thinking, already. Roll up your sleeves.”

Citing Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” she said the French should work harder, earn more and be rewarded with lower taxes if they get rich.
[...]
Certainly, the new president himself has cultivated his image as a nonintellectual. “I am not a theoretician,” he told a television interviewer last month. “I am not an ideologue. Oh, I am not an intellectual! I am someone concrete!”

That prompted this blunt response from well-known French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy:

“This is the sort of thing you can hear in cafe conversations from morons who drink too much,”

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