Pete Seeger Quotes

Town after town has but one newspaper or one radio station. It is often owned by Murdoch. Yes, we don't have as much freedom of the press as we think we have - although the traditional freedom of speech is strongly rooted in American culture.

Being generous of spirit is a wonderful way to live.

John McCutcheon is not only one of the best musicians in the USA, but also a great singer, songwriter, and song leader. And not just incidentally, he is committed to helping hard-working people everywhere to organize and push this world in a better direction.

Looking back, I think I tried to be too eclectic. Sometimes I'd sing thirty songs, and fifteen of them were not in English.

There is no such thing as a wrong note ... just as long as you're singing along.

And there's a wonderful parable in the New Testament: The sower scatters seeds. Some seeds fall in the pathway and get stamped on, and they don't grow. Some fall on the rocks, and they don't grow. But some seeds fall on fallow ground, and they grow and multiply a thousandfold. Who knows where some good little thing that you've done may bring results years later that you never dreamed of?

If I had an axe on the evening at Newport when [Dylan] broke out the electric guitar, I'd have cut his cable.

Food is one of the great organizing tools.

I still call myself a communist, because communism is no more what Russia made of it than Christianity is what the churches make of it.

The first step in solving a problem is admitting there is a problem to be solved.

Music does affect your opinions. Plato is supposed to have said "It's very dangerous to allow the wrong kind of music into the republic."

I feel most spiritual when I'm out in the woods. I feel part of nature. Or looking up at the stars. [I used to say] I was an atheist. Now I say, it's all according to your definition of God. According to my definition of God, I'm not an atheist. Because I think God is everything. Whenever I open my eyes I'm looking at God.

Hope that there are many, many small leaders.

My job, is to show folks there's a lot of good music in this world, and if used right it may help to save the planet.

Songs won't save the planet, but neither will books or speeches.

A good song reminds us what we're fighting for.

I try to sing many different kinds of songs. If I sing a batch of humorous songs, I'll throw in a deadly serious song. Or if I'm singing too many serious songs, I'll throw in a ridiculous song, to mix it up.

A song is like a picture of a bird in flight; the bird was moving before the picture was taken, and no doubt continued after.

Now any person who plays an acoustic guitar standing up on stage with a microphone is a folk singer. Some grandmother with a baby in her arms singing a 500-year-old song, well, she's not a folk singer, she's not on stage with a guitar and a microphone. No, she's just an old grandmother singing an old song. The term "folk singer" has gotten warped.

I’ve never sung anywhere without giving the people listening to me a chance to join in - as a kid, as a lefty, as a man touring the U.S.A. and the world, as an oldster. I guess it’s kind of a religion with me. Participation. That’s what’s going to save the human race.

It was only through the years that I realized what an absolutely extraordinarily thoughtful person Dr. King was.

I believe that all technological societies tend to self-destruct. The reason is that the very things that make us a successful technological society, such as our curiosity, our ambition and determination, will also cause us to fall.

I'm still a communist in the sense that I don't believe the world will survive with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer - I think that the pressures will get so tremendous that the social contract will just come apart.

All songwriters are links in a chain.

Alan [Lomax] and his father started off changing the definition of folk music from something ancient and anonymous to something very contemporary.

Do you know the difference between education and experience? Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't.

One of the things I'm most proud of about my country is the fact that we did lick McCarthyism back in the fifties.

Long live teachers of children, because they can show children how they can save the world.

I guess I've learned more from the Clearwater than anything else. All I did was help to plant a seed, and I didn't know what the hell I was doing.

There's a story behind every old ballad or work song or nonsense song that I ever knew. Sometimes it's a fascinating story. A story of people struggling for freedom, struggling to get along in this old world.

Historically, I believe I was correct in refusing to answer their questions.

It's a very important thing to learn to talk to people you disagree with.

You have a right to your opinion and I've got a right to mine. Period.

My dad, the old professor, used to say, 'Never get into an argument about what's folk music and what isn't.'

I came along and was a teenager in the Depression, and nobody had jobs. So I went out hitchhiking, when I met a man named Woody Guthrie. He was the single biggest part of my education.

I am saying voluntarily that I have sung for almost every religious group in the country, from Jewish and Catholic, and Presbyterian and Holy Rollers and Revival Churches.

Many Americans knew their lives and their souls were being struggled for, and they fought for it. And I felt I should carry on.

Realize that little things lead to bigger things.

Any idiot can be complicated. It takes a genius to be simple.

Again, I say I will be glad to tell what songs I have ever sung, because singing is my business.

We will never know everything. But I think if we can learn within the next few decades to face the danger we all are in, I believe there will be tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions, of human beings working wherever they are to do something good.

I like to say I'm more conservative than Goldwater. He just wanted to turn the clock back to when there was no income tax.

Parents are the hardest-working members of the population. But they do it for the highest wages. Kisses.

The world will be solved by millions of small things.

I was never enthusiastic about being somebody who was supposed to be silent about being a member of something.

I have to resist the temptation to want to learn everything. You know, you can't. You have to restrict yourself at some time, or else you find yourself just being spread too thin. And already I think I try too many things.

My mother gave me a ukulele at age eight, and I sang the popular tunes of the day.

My mother playing the violin and my father and grandfather playing the piano, classical stuff.