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.

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.

I maintain music is not here to make us forget about life. It's also here to teach us about life: the fact that everything starts and ends, the fact that every sound is in danger of disappearing, the fact that everything is connected - the fact that we live and we die.

The greatness of a musician is measured by the degree of fanaticism he brings to his playing.

I don't like possessions.

No one can be an artist without a rich inner life.

I believe education is much more important than we assume.

Music is not a profession. Music is a way of life - one that requires much professionalism.

For many people, music is here to let them forget the daily chores of life.

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.

Beethoven was a deeply political man in the broadest sense of the word. He was not interested in daily politics, but concerned with questions of moral behaviour and the larger questions of right and wrong affecting the entire society.

Music is very abstract. When we talk about music, we're not discussing the music itself but rather how we react to it.

Beethoven's importance in music has been principally defined by the revolutionary nature of his compositions. He freed music from hitherto prevailing conventions of harmony and structure.

Music means different things to different people and sometimes even different things to the same person at different moments of his life.

I would like to be a terrorist for music education - to make a complete reform, all over the world.

In the beginning, there was silence. And out of the silence came the sound. The sound is not here.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

My private life, my relationships are much, much more important than my career.

I guess because we're essentially a two-man band, we're attracting Wham's crowd. But Wham! are more of a businessman's band.

We rushed to finish the album when 'Mad World' became a hit. The pressure was on and it stopped being as enjoyable as it had been; in the end, it wasn't enjoyable at all.

We've been playing together since we were 13, and from the age of 18, we've had a record contract. I think that we've been incredibly lucky, yeah. But we deserve it.

Sometimes albums can be quick, sometimes they take forever, and we're very good at taking forever.

I think Roland read 'Primal Scream' first and then gave it to me. This was, I think, even prior to 'The Graduate' days. We both got heavily into and it offered a lot of questions about how screwed up our home life was.

When we play live show we tend to find there's a whole portion that's a considerably younger demographic. That's quite gratifying. They primarily seem to be into 'The Hurting' which I guess makes sense.