The age of the book is almost gone.

Central to everything I am and believe and have written is my astonishment, naive as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to bless, to love, to build, to forgive and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate.

When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.

The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.

To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.

The letter kills the spirit. The written text is mute in the face of responding challenge. It does not admit of inward growth and correction. Text subverts the absolutely vital role of memory.

We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.