"Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity."
"Anti-Semitism has no historical, political and certainly no philosophical origins. Anti-Semitism is a disease."
"In the beginning, there was silence. And out of the silence came the sound. The sound is not here."
"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."
"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."
"The tempo is the suitcase. If the suitcase is too small, everything is completely wrinkled. If the tempo is too fast, everything becomes so scrambled you can't understand it."
"Tradition demands that we not speak poorly of the dead."
"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."
"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."
"Beethoven's music tends to move from chaos to order, as if order were an imperative of human existence."
"To have real knowledge, one must understand the essence of things and not only their manifestations."
"In my mother's belly, I remember not liking the tempi my father played the Beethoven Sonatas in."
"I liked very much when we lived in Hampstead. We would go for walks on the Heath. I liked it better than living in the centre of town."
"It's funny, because in 1970 I met the Beatles quite by a chance at a party. It was the Beethoven bicentenary, and I was then also playing the Beethoven Sonatas. And that's all they wanted to hear about - I wanted to talk about them, and all they wanted to talk about was Beethoven."
"There are wonderful restaurants in London. I love Indian food and I like Arab food, and I go very often to the Arab restaurant Noura."
"What the world is saying to us human beings is, 'Don't stick to the old ways, learn to think anew.' And that's what musicians do every day."
"I have music in my brain all the time, all sorts."
"When you love somebody and they die young and you are young, too, it is very hard."
"I love conducting. What I'm tired of is music administration. I don't want that. I just want to make music."
"I can't stand going out to one more dinner with some Mrs. So-and-So who might leave a million dollars to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra when she dies."
"The Barenboim Foundation has nothing to do with politics."
"You can't expect someone born into a family with no music... to understand when I'm conducting the Schoenberg Variations."
"An hour of violin lessons in Berlin is an hour where you get the child interested in music. An hour in a violin lesson in Palestine is an hour away from violence, is an hour away from fundamentalism."
"For many people, music is here to let them forget the daily chores of life."
