I'm a storyteller. I do this for the next generations. They have to know what traditional alpinism is all about.

To me, it's just not that important whether someone climbs the Eigerwand in ten hours or in three.

Ueli Steck, I'm absolutely certain, had a very strong inner drive to keep pushing. He set very high standards for himself.

Mountaineering is over. Alpinism is dead. Maybe its spirit is still alive a little in Britain and America, but it will soon die out.

I have always said that a mountain without danger is not a mountain.

Look, I do not control alpinism. But maybe I was too successful. Many in the mountaineering scene - journalists, second-rate climbers, lecturers, so-called historians - had a problem with me for many years.

I was the first man to climb the world's 14 tallest peaks without supplementary oxygen, but I never asked how high I would go, just how I would do it.

In climbing there is no question of right or wrong. Moral right or wrong, that is a religious question, they have nothing to do with anarchical activity, and classical mountaineering is a completely anarchical activity.

I was 5 when I went up my first 10,000 ft mountain, with my parents, and I have been climbing ever since.

The Dolomites are the most beautiful rock mountains in the world, but in a few million years they will just be desert.

The ayatollahs are trying to unite the whole Arab world against Israel by saying that Israel is something that should be brought to an end.

I was born to a Likud which had light; there were no shadows.

Learning the core curriculum cannot come through coercion. It must come through a recognition of the need to integrate with economic life.

The establishment of Israel was accompanied by much pain and suffering and a real trauma for the Palestinians.

I'm not opposed to talking with anyone who is willing to talk.

We must remember that Islam is not an enemy, and we have no war with Islam.

All humanity share a common future, and we must work to try and shape it together. This is our duty, and it is our responsibility to our children and grandchildren.

What happens in one region affects people across the world.

There is a crisis on the Right. It sees the Jewish and democratic state as a democracy for the Jews. This is something I cannot countenance.

Even if the Right says that Um Al-Fahm should be outside Israel, this is impossible.

I won't allow any party to evade the question of which leader they support for prime minister.

We can establish a Jewish and democratic state, but the burden of proof is on us.

The ability of the president to be perceived as someone with whom all Israelis can identify depends on his ability to avoid being a party to debate.

The politicization of the presidency would pose a real threat to the institution and its function.

All over the Middle East, we face difficult challenges: the ongoing tragedy in Syria, the instability in Iraq, and the jihadist terrorism which dares to speak in the name of Islam, brings so many to seek refuge. The Hashemite Kingdom is facing all these challenges with honor, with dignity, and with great national and human solidarity.

Conflicts, even just ones, which in the end can come at the expense of the State of Israel, are things that we must be very cautious about and hold back on personally.

We also need the world, even though many times we don't agree with it.

United Jerusalem has been and will forever be the capital of the Jewish People.

I ask the members of the Knesset to be very strict about maintaining the principles of democracy.

One cannot tell the High Court what to adjudicate. They must judge, and then the legislature must act accordingly.

When we come to the hospital to give birth, we don't come as a Jew or an Arab; we come as a human being.

The relationship between the Jews and Arabs is necessary to help build a bridge between Israelis and Palestinians.

It pains me to see the gap that exists in the public's consciousness - religious and secular - between the notion of Israel as a Jewish state and as a democratic state.

I believe that our democratic values are also born out of our Jewish faith, a 'love for the stranger,' and equality before the law - these are not foreign values: this is Judaism.

We are one family, and the connection between all Jews, all over the world, is very important to the State of Israel.

In the end, Arik believes in security above all and is a salient pragmatist, a disciple of Ben-Gurion.

Arik is suffused with a mystical belief about Jerusalem.

Undoubtedly, a democratic state without an alternative is a danger to democracy itself.

Peres came with a worldview. I also came with a worldview that I have not abandoned and that guides me still.

I know that sometimes politics creates situations in which people want to say particular things for political reasons.

We must immediately find the way to come and say to the U.S., 'Despite the difficult differences of opinion between us, there are no closer friends, and no better allies than you to us, and we to you.'

We have many candidates, like in reality television, but we don't really have a leader.

The depth of this conflict, which is more than one hundred years old, requires us to find a way to communicate... so that the residents of the Middle East, Jews and Arabs alike, can live not as if they were forced to live together, but rather destined to live together.

My door will be open to everyone.

Those who know my stance on Israeli democracy also know that there is nothing more foreign to me than the rejection of a position different to my own.

The president is the face of the State of Israel around the world: not a representative of a specific ideology but of the collective creativity and history of the Jewish people.

Every opinion must be suffered. One must listen to what may be rousing, annoying, even shocking, but it must be done honestly, fairly and with equanimity, respecting the rights of every Member of the Knesset and each faction, guarding the minority in the face of the predatory majority.

A friendship between Germany and Israel didn't always seem natural.

No nation is immune to anti-Semitism and xenophobia.

I hereby swear, in my name and that of all our descendants, that we will never act against the principle of equal rights, and we will never try and force someone from our land.