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

Theodore Bikel

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Theodore Bikel
Age: 91 †
Born: 1924
Born: May 2
Died: 2015
Died: July 21
Actor
Businessperson
Film Actor
Musician
Politician
Stage Actor
Television Actor
Trade Unionist
Vienna
Austria
Theodore Meir Bikel
Keep
Traditions
Prefer
Tradition
Choose

More quotes by Theodore Bikel

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John Huston was the kind of director that totally left you alone. Not every actor always does it right, every time, but most of the time he was re-directing someone. He was making tight adjustments, and not even in terms of interpretation because he knew that by the time that the character had been filmed... well, he got it right when he cast you.
Theodore Bikel
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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.
Theodore Bikel
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We Jews have a special attachment to the Book. The study of page after page in tomes yellowing with age was obligatory.
Theodore Bikel
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I am a universalist, passionately devoted to the cause of equality within the human family.
Theodore Bikel
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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
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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
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I glory in the fact that a human being has multiple talents and exercises them all with a degree of integrity and artistic proficiency. That's what I do.
Theodore Bikel
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But, when I toil in the field of Jewish culture which I frequently do, I am indeed a Jewish artist.
Theodore Bikel
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You don't really need modernity in order to exist totally and fully. You need a mixture of modernity and tradition.
Theodore Bikel
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It's a sad thing to contemplate, but I'm the last surviving cast member of 'The African Queen.'
Theodore Bikel
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I am filled with awe that filmmakers have the capacity to stir us and give us back a sense of wonder.
Theodore Bikel
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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
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I always sang, I always acted, I always played.
Theodore Bikel
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Throughout my life I have cared as deeply about the songs of all peoples as I have about the rights of all peoples.
Theodore Bikel
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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
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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.
Theodore Bikel
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You learn more from the flops than from the hits.
Theodore Bikel
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Epistemology is the study of knowledge. By what conduit do we know what we know?
Theodore Bikel
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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
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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.
Theodore Bikel