I'm sure that there are many Israelis who dream of waking up one day to find the Palestinians gone. And there are many Palestinians who dream of going to bed at night and waking up the next morning to find the Israelis gone.

I love conducting. What I'm tired of is music administration. I don't want that. I just want to make music.

In times of totalitarian or autocratic rule, music (indeed culture in general) is often the only avenue of independent thought. It is the only way people can meet as equals, and exchange ideas. Culture then becomes primarily the voice of the oppressed and it takes over from politics as a driving force for change.

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

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.

Jewish intellectuals contributed a great deal to insure that Europe became a continent of humanism, and it is with these humanist ideals that Europe must now intervene in the Middle East conflict.

In the beginning, there was silence. And out of the silence came the sound. The sound is not here.