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.

Music means different things to different people and sometimes even different things to the same person at different moments of his life.

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

In the long term, Israel's security rests on only one pillar: the Palestinians' acceptance of the country. It isn't the atom bomb that makes Israel secure.

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.

I have the greatest respect for the survivors of the Holocaust. We can't even imagine what these people went through.

Today, conducting is a question of ego: a lot of people believe they are actually playing the music.