I'm not sure if my involvement in causes, benefits, marches, and demonstrations has made a huge difference, but I know one thing: that involvement has connected me with the good people: people with the live hearts, the live eyes, the live heads.

Singing with children in the schools has been the most rewarding experience of my life.

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 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.

I'd like to be remembered as the sower of seeds. That's the greatest parable in the bible as far as I'm concerned. Some seeds fall in the pathway, get stomped on and don't grow. Some fall on the stones and don't even sprout, but others fall on the ground and multiply a thousand fold.

When I am chopping trees out in the woods because I heat my house with wood, I feel myself right in the middle of God. Mahalia Jackson said "I have seen God. I have seen the sun rise." So, in a sense, when anyone looks in the mirror, they look at an infinitesimally small part of God.

When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn?