Quotes By Theodore Bikel

I know for certain of only one commandment, one obligation, that God imposes upon us, and that is to be compassionate toward other human beings.

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.

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.

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

I am a universalist, passionately devoted to the cause of equality within the human family.

While we all could agree that the Zionist ideal is alive and well, there is serious doubt whether the Zionist movement can be said to be an ongoing proposition, fragmented as its components are in ideology and in practice.

I created the role of Captain Von Trapp.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Audiences are audiences.

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.

Every actor wants to direct.

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

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?