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.

Looking out at this quarter of a million people,... I truly believed, at that moment, it was possible that human beings could join together to make a positive social change.

I was raised to believe that everybody has a responsibility to their community.

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.

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.

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.