Quotes By Theodore Bikel

The play is always fresh to me. It's not the audience's fault that I've said the words before.

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.

In my mind the city of Ariel is a thorn in Israel's side and a serious obstacle to peace.

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

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.

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

I am determined to give the Yiddish language a fighting chance to survive.

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

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

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

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

On the stage you're there, it's live. There's a beginning, a middle, an end. When something is funny you hear it right away.

Having come to live in this age is as though one were to have entered another country. Learn its language or risk being left out.

I prefer to make common cause with those whose weapons are guitars, banjos, fiddles and words.

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?

All too often arrogance accompanies strength, and we must never assume that justice is on the side of the strong. The use of power must always be accompanied by moral choice.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

But, when I toil in the field of Jewish culture which I frequently do, I am indeed a Jewish artist.

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