« If the EU looks like a gathering for group photography, it owes much to its lack of registration in space and time. Europe remains a weak word that only weakly implies those who use it (a name without a possible common substitute, such as country, state, nation or homeland), because it does not arouse in its citizens any emotional, colorless and odorless vibrato because it is too cerebral. Good to conceive rather than to feel, to calculate more than to imagine, like any view of the povertyly musical mind, the marmot of thinking heads bypasses simple hearts. George Orwell could not bear the idea that an Englishman could listen to the God Save the King without standing at attention. We would fear for the mental health of a passerby who freezes on the sidewalk listening to The Hymn to Joy. »

« The countries of the Reformation have an advantage over their more backward neighbours: they do not put shutters in the windows. Virtue cultivates glass houses, vice, brothels (prostitutes in Amsterdam are on display). A citizen worthy of the name in these northern lands, does not cross a deserted street in the red at three o'clock in the morning. In the poorly heated pastor's house, the descendants of Adam and Eve do not cheat with the taxman. We play the piano and read the Bible at night, out loud, with the family. This lack of curtain comes from afar. From the very beginning of the Christian era. »

« The flesh is sad, the horizontal too, especially when you no longer read books; and the rather limited distractions of cynicism. »