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.

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.

The fact that there are singer-songwriters dealing with substantive issues is encouraging. It's important for young people to perceive that there are acceptable avenues of dissent, because we live in a world where dissent is hard-pressed; treated as if it were unpatriotic. I've always liked the concept of the loyal opposition. It allows for dissent to be a respectable part of the whole.

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.

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.

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.

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.