Quotes By Theodore Bikel
I do not know who there is among us that can claim to know God's purpose and God's intent.
Theodore Bikel
I have always striven to raise the voice of hope for a world where hate gives way to respect and oppression to liberation.
Theodore Bikel
You don't really need modernity in order to exist totally and fully. You need a mixture of modernity and tradition.
Theodore Bikel
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.
Theodore Bikel
I make no claim that Jewish culture is superior to other cultures or that the Jewish song is better than the song of my neighbor.
Theodore Bikel
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.
Theodore Bikel
I prefer to make common cause with those whose weapons are guitars, banjos, fiddles and words.
Theodore Bikel
No doubt, unity is something to be desired, to be striven for, but it cannot be willed by mere declarations.
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.
Theodore Bikel
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.
Theodore Bikel
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.
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.
Theodore Bikel
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.
Theodore Bikel
As an artist I have an even more abiding interest in the compact between the Arts and Government.
Theodore Bikel
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.
Theodore Bikel
We Jews have a special attachment to the Book. The study of page after page in tomes yellowing with age was obligatory.
Theodore Bikel
When something is moving you get that intake of breath and that stillness from the audience.
Theodore Bikel