Quotes By Theodore Bikel

I tried for a while to be an agricultural worker and was hopelessly bored. To me it was meaningless. I would stand around in heaps of manure and sings about the beauty of the work I wasn't doing.

One might have thought the world would stop ascribing moral equivalence between acts of terrorism and acts of punishing terrorism. It has not happened that way.

If I have one vanity wish, it would be to direct. It's the only thing I haven't done yet that I would like to.

I'm exceedingly proud of being an actor, but I never recommend it to anyone.

I created the role of Captain Von Trapp.

I prefer to choose which traditions to keep and which to let go.

As an artist I have an even more abiding interest in the compact between the Arts and Government.

What moves me is neither ethnocentric pride nor sectarian arrogance. I make no claim that Jewish culture is superior to other cultures. But it is mine.

We Jews have a special attachment to the Book. The study of page after page in tomes yellowing with age was obligatory.

You always draw on your experiences with live audiences to know how to do comedy on films. You're working for a laugh that may or may not come six months later, but you're working in a vacuum at the time you are doing it.

When something is moving you get that intake of breath and that stillness from the audience.

You learn more from the flops than you do from the hits.

No doubt unity is something to be desired, to be striven for, but it cannot be willed into being by mere declarations.

Right up to the middle of this century all perceptions of the world around us were delivered via the bookshelf or the paper route.

You can't expect the entire world to come to New York to see you. You have to travel to them.

Throughout my life I have cared as deeply about the songs of all peoples as I have about the rights of all peoples.

But there is a difference here: When Jewish children are murdered, Arabs celebrate the deed. The death of an Arab child is no cause for celebration in Israel.

I am a Zionist, an ardent supporter of Israel, its defender when I deem Israel to be right and its critic when I deem it to be wrong.

I always sang, I always acted, I always played.

Audiences are audiences.

Every actor wants to direct.

Must we be put to shame by much smaller and poorer countries, by Ireland, France, Austria or Sweden, who have understood that a nation's support of its arts is a matter of both national pride and cultural survival?

In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.

Although I am deeply grateful to a great many people, I forgo the temptation of naming them for fear that I might slight any by omission.

No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language.

Epistemology is the study of knowledge. By what conduit do we know what we know?

After the advent of the written word, the masses who could not - or were not permitted to - read, were given sermons by the few who could.

For I firmly believe that Jewish life, indeed any communal life, can only be organized according to democratic principles.

I am filled with awe that filmmakers have the capacity to stir us and give us back a sense of wonder.

Despite a large body of work in films, TV, theatre and concerts, I am viewed by many as a Jewish artist. I do not resent the label, except for the fact that I disapprove of labels in general.