If there is a world here in a hundred years, it's going to be saved by tens of millions of little things.

The key to the future of the world is finding the optimistic stories and letting them be known.

I learned by transcribing songs out of the Library of Congress collection in Washington where I was working. I got a job when I just turned twenty in 1939 and Alan [Lomax] needed some help. I listened to hundreds of records every week.

Technology will save us if it doesn't wipe us out first.

Well, it's one of the things that will. Words are good, and words help us become the leading species on earth to the point where we are now ready to wipe ourselves off the earth. But I think that all the arts are needed, and sports too, and cooking, food, and all these different ways of communication. Smiles, looking into eyes directly, all these different means of communication are needed to save this world. But certainly a great melody

But if by some freak of history communism had caught up with this country, I would have been one of the first people thrown in jail.

The first country conquered by any dictator is his own country.