Pete Seeger Quotes

If you love this land of the free, bring them home, bring them home, Bring them back from overseas.

This world is so full of hypocrisy, the only way you can be honest is to be a hermit.

And the people in the houses All went to the University And they got put in boxes Little boxes all the same, Little boxes all the same, Little boxes all the same, Little boxes all the same And they all come out all the same.

I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this. I would be very glad to tell you my life if you want to hear of it.

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

Alan Lomax is the person who I think should be given major credit for what has been called the "Folk Song Revival." My father participated with him because my father was a musicologist and urged trained musicians to learn about "the vernacular."

I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other.

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 write a song because I want to. I think the moment you start writing it to make money, you're starting to kill yourself artistically.

The real meaning of courage was the personal sacrifice of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King.

And when one person taps out a beat, while another leads into the melody, or when three people discover a harmony they never knew existed, or a crowd joins in on a chorus as though to raise the ceiling a few feet higher, then they also know there is hope for the world.

I don't think of God as an old white man with no belly button, nor even an old black woman with no belly button. But I agree that God is something eternal. Something cannot come out of nothing. I believe God is Everything. And I believe in infinity.

Some folklorists just collected dead bones from one graveyard, only to bury them in another, their library.

Not everybody has to sing the melody.

I feel that my whole life is a contribution.

I think the world is going to be saved by millions of small things.

Songs are funny things. They can slip across borders. Proliferate in prisons. Penetrate hard shells. I always believed that the right song at the right moment could change history.

I always knew that sooner or later there would come somebody like Woody Guthrie who could make a great song every week. Dylan certainly had a social agenda, but he was such a good poet that most of his attempts were head and shoulders above things that I and others were trying to do. ... If I had an address, I'd send him a birthday card saying, 'keep on going.'

Plagiarism is basic to all culture

The danger with the internet is that you don't need to think about music, you just search for it and you find the answer. Singing used to be part of everyday life. Women sang while pounding corn. Men sang while paddling canoes.

My father urged Alan [Lomax] not to repeat the mistakes of the European folklorists who, a century ago, had collected these peasant songs and then arranged them for part choir and accompanied them on piano, and then told the young people of their country, "Don't change a note, this is our sacred heritage." Father said, whether it's a fiddle tune or a gospel song, learn it right off the record from the people who grew up with it. Don't just learn it from a piece of paper.

If there's something wrong, speak up!

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson corresponded for 13 years before they died on the same day. They asked, "How can one have prosperity without commerce? How can one have commerce without luxury? How can one have luxury without corruption? How can you have corruption without the end of the Republic?" And they really didn't know the answer.

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

I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs.

Some of my ancestors were religious dissenters who came to America over three hundred years ago. Others were abolitionists in New England in the eighteen forties and fifties.

Folks out in the country couldn't afford to pay for anybody else to make music. They had to make their own. So the peasantry had their music, and it was about a hundred years ago given the name "Folk music".

Now somebody will ask me, Pete, how can you prove these songs really make a difference? And I have to confess I can't prove a darn thing, except that the people in power must think they do something, because they keep the songs off the air.

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

I have sung in hobo jungles, and I have sung for the Rockefellers, and I am proud that I have never refused to sing for anybody.

I never intended to make a living from music. That's the funny thing. I wanted to be a journalist.

It's a terrible thing being a patriarch. I don't even have a gray beard. But people keep calling me up for advice.

To everything there is a season.

But I decline to say who has ever listened to them, who has written them, or other people who have sung them.

Edison failed ten thousand times before he perfected the modern electric lamp. The average man would have quit at the first failure. That's why there are so many average men and only one Edison.

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

There are many people writing songs. That is absolutely wonderful. Who knows, there may be some kid in diapers and he or she might succeed in capturing in a few dozen words what great writers have spent years trying to say. Just the right word in the right place with the right melody behind it and the right rhythm. It might get around the world inch by inch, and people realize that this world is in danger, that we're in danger. That's the way "This Land Is Your Land" got to be so well known.

The good and bad are all tangled up together. American popular music is loved around the world because of its African rhythm. But that wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for slavery.

Did you ever want something really bad and then when you finally got it all you could do was stand there and grin at it?

However, the agricultural revolution took thousands of years, the Industrial Revolution took hundreds, and the information revolution only took decades. So, who knows what's going to happen in the next few decades, especially with the women's revolution.

You'd be surprised how many stupid mistakes I've made. I make stupid mistakes all the time, and some of them have been very big stupid mistakes.

My mother wanted me to learn how to read music. She'd given fiddles to my two older brothers, but they'd rebelled. I came along and my father said, "Oh, let Peter enjoy himself." What she did was leave musical instruments all around the house. Whistles, marimbas, squeeze boxes, a piano and organ. By age six or seven, I could bang out a simple tune on almost anything. I developed a good ear, so I didn't learn to read music until I taught myself at age eighteen, 'cause I was hearing so many good songs I couldn't possibly remember them all.

How can you save the world you have not seen if you can't save the community you have seen?

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.

If there's a world here in a hundred years, it's going to be saved by tens of millions of little things. The powers-that-be can break up any big thing they want. They can corrupt it or co-opt it from the inside, or they can attack it from the outside. But what are they going to do about 10 million little things? They break up two of them, and three more like them spring up!

Music has always had the ability to comfort and inspire.

The American Indians were Communists. They were. Every anthropologist will tell you they were Communists. No rich, no poor. If somebody needed something the community chipped in.

The world would never amount to a hill of beans if people didn't use their imaginations to think of the impossible.