140 Quotes by Daniel Barenboim

Not only has the eyes taken over, but we have anaesthetised the ears through all the muzak that we hear all the time.

The ear plays the role of the guide in the museum in the concert I'm taking now. We don't have an oral guide, we have to provide it ourselves. One reason why active listening is absolutely essential.

The French Revolution gave us three... powerful ideas, or concepts - liberty, equality and fraternity. But these ideas... are not only right in themselves, but they are so because they come in the proper order. You cannot have equality without liberty, and you certainly cannot have fraternity without equality. The importance of this I learnt from music, because music evolves in time, and therefore the order inevitably determines the content.

In times of totalitarian or autocratic rule, music (indeed culture in general) is often the only avenue of independent thought. It is the only way people can meet as equals, and exchange ideas. Culture then becomes primarily the voice of the oppressed and it takes over from politics as a driving force for change.

And in English you have this wonderful difference between listening and hearing, and that you can hear without listening, and you can listen and not hear.

Music has the capacity to create a greater reality.

When you love somebody and they die young and you are young, too, it is very hard.

Anti-Semitic? What is anti-Semitic about it? ...There is no logic to this claim.

The Barenboim Foundation has nothing to do with politics.