« Who sanctifies dreams at the bottom of an end of history. Who desecrates restarts the manufacture of the human. Any sanctity too high perched can be said intolerable because it is intolerant. Excludes debate, goes up to extremes and evades critical judgment from the criteria of good and evil. When this is not the absolute excuse of the despicable, it is the alibi of the arbitrary and the shelter of the reactionary. »

« It is at the joint, at the interfaces, that we find the most resourceful. The border cities raise the heavy paste: Tangier, Trieste, Salonika, Alexandria, Istanbul. Welcome to creators and entrepreneurs. To drug smugglers and ideas. To the flow accelerators. Profile of the borderman: loustic, inventive, more awake than the numbness of the hinterland. We all have a debt to them. »

« Some silliness and politically correct clichés: This fake old gentleman, every year that passes gives him a youthful kick ... (p. 11) (Brassens and Valery) The patrician and the plebeian, equal for technique and discipline, haunted by the accuracy of words and their music, meet at a distance... The Olympia and Olympus are two equally royal paths to Beauty. 18. (The Mediterranean) The inland sea is united by a luminous, plural, mixed-race humanism ... p. 24 (Mallarmé) Valéry was twenty years old, in 1891, when he came to meet "the supreme, the paternal friend", an English teacher at the local school... p. 35 (Minorities in the Dreyfus Affair) The Protestant tropism led Gide to rally the petitioners of L'Aurore: a minority status, in this case religious and sexual, is always likely to push into the right camp. 61. "Two things threaten the world: order and disorder." In other words, the right and the left. p.106 Etc... »