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

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

I was working for Alan Lomax in the Library of Congress folk song archive, and starting to realize what a wealth of different kinds of music there was in this country that you never heard on the radio.

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.

Way back in the old days, say in Europe of the Middle Ages, you had an aristocracy, and they could afford to pay for musicians. The kings and queens had musicians in the castles, and that developed into symphony orchestras and what we call "Classical music" now.

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.

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.