Jews From The United States

"When a man points a finger at someone else, he should remember that four of his fingers are pointing to himself."

"The composer makes plans, music laughs."

"Most music is metaphor, but Wolff is not. I am not metaphor either. Parable, maybe. Cage is sermon."

""...We met in 1950, through John Cage, when I was sixteen and he in his early twenties. We were all doing work that was clearly different, newly different - from one another, but joined by our delight in each other's work (and by John Cage's organizing the concerts of it and a few musicians, David Tudor centrally, playing it), and by its difference from any other we knew. I still find mysterious his way of putting the music together, or rather of erasing any traces of a sense of its having been put together: it's just there. How does he do it? He's the only composer I know whose work seems made in a way that cannot be accounted for, explained, by any other means than the impossible one of becoming that composer oneself. He talked wonderfully, sharply, outrageously, but that wasn't quite his music. One thinks of the disparity of his large, strong presence and the delicate, hypersoft music, but in fact he too was, among other things, full of tenderness and the music is, among other things, as tough as nails." - Christian Wolff, Composer and Pianist"

"[Regarding indeterminacy]"...I think this interest had to do with his interest in painting. He used to put sheets of graph paper on the wall, and work on them like paintings. Slowly his notation would accumulate, and from time to time he'd stand back to look at the overall design. For him it had less to do with belief in chance: it was more function than anything else. He would talk about different weights of sound - and that was simply the easiest way to express them. Pitches didn't really matter, as there were so many other controls, and he used chance without its interfering with expression. What Cage admired in him and what they had most in common was heroism - trusting in performers, despite the risk that they might destroy the thing completely. Unless the performer committed himself to the pieces, they could be horrible, and it was their very dangerousness which made them so beautiful. Cage's were beautiful in the same way, just because you never knew what would come next." - Christian Wolff, Composer and Pianist"

"If you don't have a friend who's a painter, you're in trouble."

"Sound is all our dreams of music. Noise is music's dreams of us."

"Do we have anything in music for example that really wipes everything out? That just cleans everything away?"

"My teacher Stefan Wolpe was a Marxist and he felt my music was too esoteric at the time. And he had his studio on a proletarian street, on Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue. . . . He was on the second floor and we were looking out the window, and he said, "What about the man on the street?" At that moment . . . Jackson Pollock was crossing the street."

"For years I said if I could only find a comfortable chair I would rival Mozart."

"To me, I took a militant attitude towards sounds. I wanted sounds to be a metaphor, that they could be as free as a human being might be free. That was my idea about sound. It still is, that they should breathe … not to be used for the vested interest of an idea. I feel that music should have no vested interests, that you shouldn't know how it's made, that you shouldn't know if there's a system, that you shouldn't know anything about it … except that it's some kind of life force that to some degree really changes your life … if you're into it."

"To understand what music has to be, you have to live for music. Who's ready to do that?"

"...The tragedy of music is that it begins with perfection."

"It appears to me that the subject of music, from Machaut to Boulez, has always been its construction. Melodies of 12-tone rows just don't happen. They must be constructed....To demonstrate any formal idea in music, whether structure or stricture, is a matter of construction, in which the methodology is the controlling metaphor of the composition...Only by 'unfixing' the elements traditionally used to construct a piece of music could the sounds exist in themselves--not as symbols, or memories which were memories of other music to begin with."

"After all, Jews invented psychiatry to help other Jews become Gentiles."

"Music can imply the infinite if enough things depart from the norm far enough. Strange "abnormal" events can lead to the feeling that anything can happen, and you have a music with no boundaries."

"I’ve never thought much of Joe Nye’s writings on soft power."

"That war in the early 1990s changed a lot for me. I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the reinstitution of torture and rape as acts of policy. And I didn't expect so many of my comrades to be indifferent – or even take the side of the fascists. It was a time when many people on the left were saying 'Don't intervene, we'll only make things worse' or, 'Don't intervene, it might destabilise the region. And I thought – destabilisation of fascist regimes is a good thing. Why should the left care about the stability of undemocratic regimes? Wasn't it a good thing to destabilise the regime of General Franco? It was a time when the left was mostly taking the conservative, status quo position – leave the Balkans alone, leave Milosevic alone, do nothing. And that kind of conservatism can easily mutate into actual support for the aggressors. Weimar-style conservatism can easily mutate into National Socialism. So you had people like Noam Chomsky's co-author Ed Herman go from saying 'Do nothing in the Balkans', to actually supporting Milosevic, the most reactionary force in the region. That's when I began to first find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favour of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there's Richard Perle. There's Paul Wolfowitz. That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying that we had to act. Before, I had avoided them like the plague, especially because of what they said about General Sharon and about Nicaragua. But nobody could say they were interested in oil in the Balkans, or in strategic needs, and the people who tried to say that – like Chomsky – looked ridiculous. So now I was interested."

"At the same time, Kissinger, Carter and détente were condemned as weakening the West by a group of conservative Democrats led by Henry (Scoop) Jackson, a critic of SALT, as well as by key Republicans who were influential in the Ford administration (1974–7), notably his Chief of Staff, Richard (Dick) Cheney, and the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. They drew on advice from commentators such as Richard Perle, Richard Pipes and Paul Wolfowitz who warned about Soviet intentions. The continuity of this group, through 1990s’ opposition to Clintonian liberal internationalism, to the neo-conservative activism of the early 2000s, especially against Iraq, is notable."

"About George W. Bush: "He came ill-equipped for the job and has failed to master it.""

"The programme of the British Labour Party under Neil Kinnock is so wildly irresponsible, so separate and apart from the historic NATO strategy, that I think a Labour government that stood by its present policies—and I rather doubt that they would—would, if it didn't destroy the Alliance, at least diminish its effective ability to do the task for which it was created."

"Well, you’re going to find a disproportionate number of Jews in any sort of intellectual undertaking."

"I think there is a potential civic culture in Arab countries that can lead to democratic institutions and I think Iraq is probably the best place to put that proposition to the test"

"I really don't have a solution. Except to say that a precondition for any solution must be a recognition on the part of all parties on the legitimacy of all parties. That is you cannot build a political agreement on the premise that a Jewish state in Palestine is illegitimate."

"Dictators must have enemies. They must have internal enemies to justify their secret police and external enemies to justify their military forces."

"Sometimes the things we have to do are objectionable in the eyes of others."

"And a year from now, I'll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush. There is no doubt that, with the exception of a very small number of people close to a vicious regime, the people of Iraq have been liberated and they understand that they've been liberated. And it is getting easier every day for Iraqis to express that sense of liberation."

""I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing." (2003)"

"National sovereignty is an obligation as well as an entitlement. A government that will not perform the role of a government forfeits the rights of a government."

"There are no such things as incurable, there are only things for which man has not found a cure."

"Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts."

"Those who matter don't mind, and those who mind don't matter."

"Although the shooting war is over, we are in the midst of a cold war which is getting warmer."

"Let us not be deceived — we are today in the midst of a cold war. Our enemies are to be found abroad and at home. Let us never forget this: Our unrest is the heart of their success. The peace of the world is the hope and the goal of our political system; it is the despair and defeat of those who stand against us. We can depend only on ourselves."

"Peace is never long preserved by weight of metal or by an armament race. Peace can be made tranquil and secure only by understanding and agreement fortified by sanctions. We must embrace international cooperation or international disintegration. Science has taught us how to put the atom to work. But to make it work for good instead of for evil lies in the domain dealing with the principles of human dignity. We are now facing a problem more of ethics than of physics."

"Behind the black portent of the new atomic age lies a hope which, seized upon with faith, can work out salvation … Let us not deceive ourselves: we must elect world peace or world destruction."

"America has never forgotten — and never will forget — the nobler things that brought her into being and that light her path — the path that was entered upon only one hundred and fifty years ago … How young she is! It will be centuries before she will adopt that maturity of custom — the clothing of the grave — that some people believe she is already fitted for."

"It will fluctuate."

"Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible—as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead."

"If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

"In the Baruch proposal our government suggested the creation of the International Authority by the United Nations to which would be given a complete monopoly of all atomic installations, materials and stockpiles. This authority should be given power of inspection and power to call for the punishment of violators."

"A speculator is a man who observes the future, and acts before it occurs."

"I'm not smart. I try to observe. Millions saw the apple fall but Newton was the one who asked why."

"A political leader must keep looking over his shoulder all the time to see if the boys are still there. If they aren’t still there, he’s no longer a political leader."

"Vote for the man who promises least; he'll be the least disappointing."

"When beggars and shoeshine boys, barbers and beauticians can tell you how to get rich it is time to remind yourself that there is no more dangerous illusion than the belief that one can get something for nothing."

"I am interested in physical medicine because my father was. I am interested in medical research because I believe in it. I am interested in arthritis because I have it."

"I am quite sure that in the hereafter she will take me by the hand and lead me to my proper seat."

"To me, old age is always fifteen years older than I am."

"Anarchism by 1948 was tiny and existed mainly among earlier waves of immigrants. There were a few exceptions, there were people like Noam Chomsky, who was both a Zionist and an anarchist in this period."