All of us are subject to being passive to the social ills around us. It's a struggle not to become, by staying silent, an accomplice.

There has to be a certain amount of love just in order for you to survive together. I think a lot of groups have gone down the tubes because they were not able to relate to one another.

Singing 'Blowin' in the Wind' all the places we've been, it takes on a different meaning everywhere. When you sing the line, 'How many years can a people exist, before they're allowed to be free?' in a prison yard for political prisoners in El Salvador; if you have sung it to a group of union organizers, who have all been in jail, in South Korea; if you've sung to Jews in the Soviet Union who have been refused exit visas; if you've sung it with Bishop Tutu protesting apartheid, the song breathes, it lives, it has a contemporary currency.

I was raised on Josh White, the Weavers and Pete Seeger. The music was everywhere. You'd go to a party at somebody's apartment and there would be fifty people there, singing well into the night.

Folk music has a sort of a bubbling-under quality. The stream runs through the cultural consciousness, and whether or not it's on the radio is not the issue. Folk music is always there.

We’ve always been involved with issues that deal with the fundamental human rights of people, whether that means the right to political freedom or the right to breathe air that’s clean.

When the fad changed from folk to rock, they didn't take along any good writers.