“With El Sistema, you can create orchestras everywhere; then they can d...” — Juan Diego Florez Quote

“With El Sistema, you can create orchestras everywhere; then they can decide whether they want to become professional musicians. The aim is not only to create musicians, but to create people.”

“I'm lucky because my repertoire is so specific, and theaters are interested in me singing my repertoire because it is not done so much. I'm pretty well settled in my repertoire. I like what I sing. My voice is high, and there is not much in baroque opera for higher tenor.”

“Yes, I wrote songs. I was becoming kind of an Enrique Iglesias kind of a singer, with those ballads and cheesy romantic things.”

“Being typecast is the enemy of any actor, so if you can try to do something that flips on the head peoples' ideas of who you are or what you can do, that's my biggest aim.”

“Political correctness is as exploitable as any other progressive ideal, but its aim is to stifle the incessant noise of those who flap their careless lips without a thought about those they might offend and why that might be important.”

“Vietnam helped me to look at the horror and terror in the hearts of people and realize how we can't aim guns and set booby traps for people we have never spoken a word to. That kind of impersonal violence mystifies me.”