"Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity."

"Now the first step has to be taken, the step towards democracy. This step is full of risks, and requires trust on all sides. We don't know where it will lead. But if we just stand still, we will have no chance of escaping the violence."

"Anti-Semitism has no historical, political and certainly no philosophical origins. Anti-Semitism is a disease."

"Sound is often talked about in a very subjective way, as if it had a colour. This is a bright sound, this is a dark sound. I don't believe in that because I think that is much too subjective."

"Tradition demands that we not speak poorly of the dead."

"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."

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

"US presidents can make all the commitments and declarations they want until they are blue in the face, in the Muslim world they will always be perceived as partisan."

"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."