We are always confronted with choice.

If Christ would have left Christian ethics codified on the table, then he wouldn't produce moral beings choosing between good and evil, but conformists fulfilling orders. I think the same can be said about the Bible.

In a liquid modern life there are no permanent bonds, and any that we take up for a time must be tied loosely so that they can be untied again, as quickly and as effortlessly as possible, when circumstances change - as they surely will in our liquid modern society, over and over again.

Never paint epic canvases during the revolution, because the revolutionaries will tear them apart.

In Celan's words a Jew is "a man with a little book under the shoulder." We are the keepers of tradition.

Our consumer-oriented economy wouldn't survive without economic growth. The whole mechanism depends on invention and insinuation of novelties, arousing new wants, seduction and temptation. This is the problem we face - much more than recapitalizing the banks. The question is: Is that kind of economy sustainable?

Now people are worried not about the prospects of buying new things, but about how to pay for the things they bought yesterday, a year ago or years before. It is, as Americans like to say, "a wholly different kind of ball-game".