Theodore Bikel

Bekannte Zitate von 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 have always striven to raise the voice of hope for a world where hate gives way to respect and oppression to liberation.

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

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.

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

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.