Leonard Bernstein

In the olden days, everybody sang. You were expected to sing as well as talk. It was a mark of the cultured man to sing.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.

I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.

A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.

Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.