I think that human beings are capable of the worst things possible and they show that there were times, and there probably are times, that it is human to be inhuman.

Except that a human being is both the public and the private. We are both, private and public in the same person.

He explained to me with great insistence that every question posessed a power that did not lie in the answer.

To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.

I do not deal with the text [of the Bible] scientifically. I read it, I'm interested in its layers of meaning, but my relation to it is much more an emotional one.

Holy War is a contradiction of terms.

I believe in books. And when our people [coughing] - our people of Jerusalem, let's say after the Romans destroyed the temple and the city, all we took is a little book, that's all. Not treasures, we had no treasures. They were ransacked, taken away. But the book - the little book - and this book produced more books, thousands, hundreds of thousands of books, and in the book we found our memory, and our attachment to that memory is what kept us alive.