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.

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.

Folk music has always contained a concern for the human condition. And since it brings people into it from different points of view, that can help illuminate what a consensus might be to important issues.

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.

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 to believe that everybody has a responsibility to their community and I use the word very loosely. It's a big community. If I get recognized in the middle of the Sinai Desert I have a big community.

If we are going to teach the world to stop hating the different, the other, then we’re going to have to start with children.