Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.

In the olden days, everybody sang. You were expected to sing as well as talk. It was a mark of the cultured man to sing.

The 20th century has been a badly written drama, from the beginning.

It is the artists of the world, the feelers and the thinkers who will ultimately save us; who can articulate, educate, defy, insist, sing and shout the big dreams.

Even experimental composers, revolutionary composers, self-styled radicals are, in writing revolutionary music, recognizing the music that preceded them precisely by trying to avoid it.

The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.

This must be the mission of every man of goodwill: to insist, unflaggingly, at risk of becoming a repetitive bore, but to insist on the achievement of a world in which the mind will have triumphed over violence.