Esa-Pekka Salonen Quotes

It's good to have high-quality competition. It helps drive research forward at a faster pace.

Performing arts buildings are complex. The acoustics, the sight lines and all that have to just be perfect. So you begin with just making these things sublime as musical instruments. And if you fail there, you have failed it all.

Everywhere in the world, music enhances a hall, with one exception: Carnegie Hall enhances the music.

When you hear a great two-track of a performance in Carnegie Hall, let's say, it sounds like you're right there at that moment. It's true to reality. And the closer it gets, once it gets too technical, it becomes very tinny to hear notes. It doesn't sound right. It has to be natural.

Exploration is the engine that drives innovation. Innovation drives economic growth.

It has long been my desire to be a little worm in the fair apple of Progress.

To stand still is to regress.

Even when I have someone playing the song I give them the idea. I'm learning. I'm getting better over the years.

Progress is not accomplished in one stage.

Progress requires change.

Higher has always been the trajectory of intelligent evolution.

What wonderful thing didn't start out scary?

I think we need to remember...that a lot of energy was put into changing things to get us to the point where we are now. But being where we are now doesn't mean that we don't have to put in the same kind of energy to get us to a place where we ought to be.

By so many measures, our country is stronger and more prosperous than it was when we first got here. And I'm hopeful we'll build on the progress we've made in the years to come.

When something is 'new and improved', which is it? If it's new, then there has never been anything before it. If it's an improvement, then there must have been something before it.

Progress is the ultimate motivation.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.

You are either getting better or getting worse, but you are never staying the same.

You’ve got to try and take things to the next level, or you’ll just get stuck in a rut.

A thousand things advance; nine hundred and ninety nine retreat; That is progress.

There's no straight line to progress.

Cause mo better makes it mo better.

We've had to overcome a lot in America to become a nation of progress. We still have a lot of progress to be made.

Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity…It is a part of nature.