An orchestra full of stars can be a disaster.

I always imagined that to bring an orchestra to play together is not enough for a conductor.

Since the composer has said everything, if you discover everything, it will be enough and you will be a happy man. Don't try to say it's your taste, and because of that you are changing this or that. And I must say this respect is still there.

I wouldn't say I've changed my mind. I changed some of my natural habits, some of my natural character.

And to understand this, I think this is a most important point where I would like always to be understood what we do with the New York Philharmonic. That the meaning of the music is number one.

The message of music was also the first thing what I learned from my first teacher. She was an organist too and she was very devoted to what she played, so she had a respect for every piece and she felt that she is not allowed to add something of her own.

I believe so, but at first he must know. He must know in which spirit Beethoven has composed this piece. He must try to study that. And he must find out in which station of life of Beethoven he did.

I was different from most young conductors today.

If you go to Japan for instance, you should know that they have a different way of playing Beethoven or Brahms. But if you play with them Mozart, Debussy, Mendelssohn, they have a wonderful light feeling for that.

Young conductors who are confident enough, they very often have success.

You know as I started as a shy young conductor, I always wanted to cooperate. To build up the musicians. To help them to be better than without a conductor. And sometimes young talented musicians have to be encouraged.

And if you are strong enough, then you can grow as a conductor more and more.

I can go in front of an orchestra. I can go in front of an audience. But if you see me walking through an audience in the reception or through a lot of people, I'm still shy.

In South America, I heard the 8th Symphony of Beethoven. And the young conductor thought, Beethoven must be heroic. But this is piece which shouldn't be heroic. And this was such a misunderstanding, such a deep misunderstanding.

At the age of 16, something happened with my finger and the doctor told me, you never can be a organist or pianist, so think about what you do with music.

You have to change your mind with every orchestra because every orchestra has a different character.

Even my family laughed at me because they thought this young guy who's always stuttering in front of other people should be in front of 100 musicians and talk to them and leading them.

And I always tried to be not a star. To be someone who people like to talk to.

What I never overcame is a kind of shyness.

An orchestra full of stars can be a disaster.

Even I had no opportunity to conduct very many concerts after World War II.

And at the same time, I had my very first concert at the age of 16. I hadn't heard a symphony orchestra before, and I was so deeply impressed I said I have to be a conductor.

I worked on scores. I went to the musical library in Berlin which is very famous. I discovered that we had scores of Beethoven, printed scores of Beethoven, that are full of mistakes. Not the wrong or false notes, but the wrong dynamic, understandable things.

As I came to New York, it was for me a new beginning. To discover what people are living here. What do they need, what do they expect, what would they like to be the image and the performance of the New York Philharmonic?

Very often, if I know the orchestra doesn't know a piece or it's a new piece, I have main ideas about it. But then we start to play and I never talk about places where they played so beautiful and so clear in the beginning that there is nothing to say.

Sometimes if you have very confident people, you have to tell them please, be polite, there are other players are good enough as you and you should never speak out of an orchestra.

If the economy becomes disembodied from society it can only lead to disaster.

The most dire disaster in love is the death of imagination.

Americans rightly asked, if this is the way our government responds to a natural disaster it knew about days in advance, how would it respond to a surprise terrorist attack? How would it respond to an earthquake?

Unlike most major American cities, Honolulu is geographically insulated from the rest of the country. When disaster strikes we cannot call on neighboring states for assistance.

The future is not Big Government. Self-serving politicians. Powerful bureaucrats. This has been tried, tested throughout history. The result has always been disaster. President Obama, your agenda is not new. It's not change, and it's not hope.

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.

The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.

We did it Disneyland, in the knowledge that most of the people I talked to thought it would be a financial disaster - closed and forgotten within the first year.

I attended a very small junior high and specially in the end that became a disaster. The principal was pretty senile and a drunk, so the children more or less runned the school.

If I could learn to treat triumph and disaster the same, then I would find bliss.

There are no quick fixes to Indigenous poverty and social disaster.

The word survivor suggests someone who has emerged alive from a plane crash or a natural disaster. But the word can also refer to the loved ones of murder victims, and this was the sense in which it was used at a four-day conference in early June at Boston College.

Homeowners and business owners across the country agreed to pay premiums, communities agreed to adopt building codes to mitigate flood dangers, and the Federal Government agreed to provide insurance coverage to policyholders after a disaster.

We pray that every field of science may contribute in bringing happiness - not disaster - to human beings.

There is such a thing as tempting the gods. Talking too much, too soon and with too much self-satisfaction has always seemed to me a sure way to court disaster. The forces of retribution are always listening. They never sleep.

First, those images help us understand the general and specific magnitude of disaster caused by the tsunami. The huge outpouring of aid would not have happened without those images.

The war on Iraq was a disaster, clearly carried out under false pretences.

Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster.

Pride and excess bring disaster for man.

Technology without hatred can be a blessing. Technology with hatred is always a disaster.

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

He taught me never to smile, which helps me when I visit disaster sites.

It never occurred to me that we would have as grandiose a program as the Marshall Plan, but I felt that we had to do something to save Europe from economic disaster which would encourage the Communist takeover.