In earlier times, so many people sang much more. You know as a kid you'd go to some kind of religious training and or summer camp or whatever it was and you'd learn to sing a lot of songs.

Being a conductor is kind of a hybrid profession because most fundamentally, it is being someone who is a coach, a trainer, an editor, a director.

If you're curious, if you have a capacity for wonder, if you're alive, you know all that you need to know [about music].

Classical music is an unbroken, living tradition that goes back over 1,000 years, and every one of those years has had something unique and powerful to say to us about what it's like to be alive.

The big difference between human happiness and sadness? Thirty-seven freakin' vibrations.

You can't have Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as your favorite composers. They simply define what music is!

Classical music is a wonderful 1200 year-old tradition that witnesses everything that it has meant and what it means right now to be human.

The whole path of American music has been so much about the recognition of stylistic diversity, and the recognition of the importance of music which was from one of the vernacular traditions.

I think music needs to be presented in a way so that kids can grasp songs, dances, simple music that's associated with some particular defining moment in human experience.

When I first was conducting as guest conductor in Europe 25 years ago, I would propose doing American pieces and grudgingly it would be accepted from time to time.

Extreme volume in music very often disguises a lack of actually important content.

I travel to know the life of great souls in the pages of a book.

There is something profoundly satisfying about sharing a meal. Eating together, breaking bread together, is one of the oldest and most fundamentally unifying of human experiences.

As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory.

Moral sensibilities are nowadays at such cross-purposes that to one man a morality is proved by its utility, while to another its utility refutes it.

David James is frustrated because he thinks us being bottom isn't helping his chances with England. I think it gives him more chance to show his ability.

We used to actually kill each other before we discovered rhetoric in words. If you look at other countries, there are people attacking each other in parliament and stuff.

I see ethical considerations as having a certain priority in our interactions - passing judgment on our political and legal processes.

Obey God's law first before considering the laws of man.

An army which cannot be reenforced is already defeated.

Myth: There's conflict between selfish free markets and a benevolent world of human sympathy.