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.

There are many types of silence. There is a silence before the note, there is a silence at the end and there is a silence in the middle.

The tempo is the suitcase. If the suitcase is too small, everything is completely wrinkled. If the tempo is too fast, everything becomes so scrambled you can't understand it.

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.

I can't stand being in Chicago anymore and hearing the Brahms Violin Concerto in the elevator. Because that shows me that when they come to the concert hall they listen to it in the same way.

Music has the capacity to create a greater reality.

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