If a man dreams about sleeping with Marilyn Monroe, he's certainly entitled to that. But when he wakes up, he has to acknowledge that he is married to someone else.

I always maintain that playing in an orchestra intelligently is the best school for democracy. If you play a solo, the conductor and everybody in the orchestra follows you. Then, a few bars later, the main voice goes to another instrument, another group, and then you have to go back into the collective [sound]. The art of playing in an orchestra is being able to express yourself to the maximum but always in relation to something else that is going on.

Germany will never be a real, free thinking and free feeling friend of Israel, because it will always fall under this shadow.

An Israeli who thinks that his government is doing everything right wouldn't join the Divan Orchestra in the first place.

Anti-Semitism has no historical, political and certainly no philosophical origins. Anti-Semitism is a disease.

The French Revolution gave us three... powerful ideas, or concepts - liberty, equality and fraternity. But these ideas... are not only right in themselves, but they are so because they come in the proper order. You cannot have equality without liberty, and you certainly cannot have fraternity without equality. The importance of this I learnt from music, because music evolves in time, and therefore the order inevitably determines the content.

To have real knowledge, one must understand the essence of things and not only their manifestations.