Revolutions are celebrated when they are no longer dangerous.

Revolutions are celebrated when they are no longer dangerous.

'Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta' is a kind of expansion of chamber music.

Acting and performing music is exactly the same. Therefore, an actor, for instance, who is very impressive, he's not simply imitating or trying to imitate, but he must dominate this kind of feeling, and then he transmits it in a much stronger way.

All the people with whom I was very close at one point in my life - Stockhausen, Berio, Ligeti, Nono, Bernd Alois Zimmermann - they are all gone.

Certainly I was a bully. I'm not ashamed of it at all. The hostility of the establishment to what you were able to do in the Forties and Fifties was very strong. Sometimes you have to fight against your society.

Conducting is more difficult than playing a single instrument. You have to know the culture, to know the score, and to project what you want to hear. Some conductors are well prepared but cannot transmit their ideas to an orchestra, and others are good communicators but have nothing to transmit because they are not absorbed enough in the score.

I almost chose the career of an ethnomusicologist because I was so fascinated by that music. It gives a different feeling of time.

I always admired very much the virtuosity in Strauss because, really, he's a master of using the orchestra. And I like virtuosity, I must say, even if the taste of the music is not always mine.

I always think the relationship between a teacher and a student should be short and maybe violent. You don't need to spend years together. All you need is an explosion: you are the material to explode; the teacher is the detonator.

I am not nostalgic about things. When you have a kind of improvement, I am not nostalgic about the past.

I discovered 'Rite of Spring' when I was 21. As a matter of fact, not with orchestra first, because it was still a work which was not often performed. Don't forget that I was 19 in 1944, still the Occupation time. So it was performed slightly after the end of the war, in 1945.

I said if I ever conducted, I would always give myself the best chance to succeed - though sometimes, despite everything, you still fail.

I wanted contemporary music to be treated the same as the traditional repertoire - performed regularly by people who knew each other and the music. That is the way you convince an audience.

In business, in the music world, people know that I can be very friendly and warm but that, after a certain moment, the business is closed. I like to be alone: in order to concentrate on my work, the social life does not exist. It has never existed for me, really. I have chosen instead the working life because I prefer that.

My parents were so far from the music world that they couldn't conceive how you could make a living. But for me, it was the only solution for the rest of my life.

People see me as a theoretician, but my music is also seductive, even spiritual.

Some members of the Vienna Philharmonic convinced me to try Bruckner, which I have never done before. And that was interesting to me to have this experience with this orchestra, which knows the repertoire very well, and to be confronted with this knowledge, and to learn from them.

The first time I came to New York in 1952, I was busy with music. I made the acquaintance at this period with John Cage, and also the acquaintance of Varese for the first time. We were very good friends. He gave me some scores, and we recorded them a little later.

The most difficult problem in conducting is intonation. You must know what is wrong and how to correct it.

Webern was a kind of 'Kamchatka of music,' an unknown country of music. That's true; for me and people of my generation, he was a radical - you couldn't be more radical than he was.

The important thing for me when I look at characters is to consider the kind of constraints placed upon them. Now, me personally, I don't like to have a lot of constraints placed upon me.

At CARE, a leading humanitarian organization, we recognize people live their lives in a holistic manner. Issues such as health care, education and economic empowerment cannot be addressed in a vacuum. Thus, effective programs need to tackle the multiple root causes of poverty.

The individual activity of one man with backbone will do more than a thousand men with a mere wishbone.

We have to make America the best place in the world to do business.

I have found that I always learn more from my mistakes than from my successes. If you aren't making some mistakes, you aren't taking enough chances.

Daydreaming is one of the key sources of poetry - a poem often starts as a daydream that finds its way into language - and walking seems to bring a different sort of alertness, an associative kind of thinking, a drifting state of mind.

Any government that supports, protects or harbours terrorists is complicit in the murder of the innocent and equally guilty of terrorist crimes.

The whole problem of the sound-work is distancing oneself from the dramatic.

To keep your marriage brimming, with love in the loving cup. Whenever you're wrong, admit it. Whenever you're right, shut up.

That freedom of writing you don't get in other formats, I'd rather leave it to someone else to deal with the headache of drafting my book into a screenplay.

You can employ men and hire hands to work for you, but you must win their hearts to have them work with you.

I'll look back and I'd be better to answer that in about three months from now. Or when the movie comes out and I see it. I don't even know what it is yet. I've still been in the middle of it.

My style is I work hard at it. I feel like I'm prepared every day.

Henry Kissinger is perhaps the best-known American statesman of the 20th century.

I majored in political science, and my concentration was U.S. involvement in Latin America in the 20th century.

The last thing the NFL wants to do is make problems for the colleges.

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

Who do I like? I am a big fan of French and Saunders - not that that they are particularly stand-up I have to say, but I think they have been great for women and they are of themselves just incredibly funny whether they are male or female.

Every economy is uncertain. Referring to this or any economy as "uncertain" is an unnecessary and pessimistic redundancy.

I had a son born to me when I was 50, and I thought, 'He needs someone to bowl to him.'

I've had my run-ins with department stores, like Harrods, which stopped selling fur coats, but I found some there with fur trim, which is just as disgusting. Foie gras production is appalling - there's no excuse for selling it.

Veterans Day is an acknowledgment that those willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for our country - and their families - deserve our admiration and respect today and every day.

Grandfathers are for loving and fixing things.

I won't eat anything I can't spell or wouldn't tread in.