Top 100 Pete Seeger Quotes
#1. 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.
Pete Seeger
#2. I came from an intellectual family. Most were doctors, preachers, teachers, businessmen. My grandfather was a small businessman. His father was an abolitionist doctor, and his father was an immigrant from Germany.
Pete Seeger
#3. 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".
Pete Seeger
#4. 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.
Pete Seeger
#5. There is a big, beautiful world that could be destroyed by selfishness and foolishness. We musicians have it within our power to help save it. In a small way, every single one of us counts.
Pete Seeger
#6. Education is what you get when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get if you don't.
Pete Seeger
#7. 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.
Pete Seeger
#8. 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.
Pete Seeger
#9. Music has always had the ability to comfort and inspire.
Pete Seeger
#10. Parents are the hardest-working members of the population. But they do it for the highest wages. Kisses.
Pete Seeger
#11. 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.
Pete Seeger
#12. I think the world is going to be saved by millions of small things.
Pete Seeger
#13. 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.
Pete Seeger
#14. 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.
Pete Seeger
#15. People are combining traditions like never before and finding somehow a fundamental unity for this human race of ours. I think working with each other as Jeff Haynes has done here-we may be surprised to find what deeper unity all human beings have.
Pete Seeger
#16. When you're facing an opponent over a broad front, you don't aim for the opponent's strong points, important though they may be. Pick a little outpost that you can capture and win. And then you find another place that you can capture and win it, and then you move slowly toward the big places.
Pete Seeger
#17. 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. Whenever I'm listening to something, I'm listening to God.
Pete Seeger
#18. Historically, I believe I was correct in refusing to answer their questions.
Pete Seeger
#19. 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.
Pete Seeger
#20. I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other.
Pete Seeger
#21. I tell kids, don't trust the media. The media with their emphasis on fame is helping to destroy this country, helping destroy the human race. It's the plug-in drug.
Pete Seeger
#22. Any idiot can be complicated. It takes a genius to be simple.
Pete Seeger
#23. The world will be saved by people fighting for their homes.
Pete Seeger
#24. When I got out of school, I spent two years just hitchhiking around. Every time I met some old farmer who could play banjo, I got him to teach me a lick or two. Little by little, I put it together.
Pete Seeger
#25. I decline to discuss, under compulsion, where I have sung, and who has sung my songs, and who else has sung with me, and the people I have known.
Pete Seeger
#26. Technology will save us if it doesn't wipe us out first.
Pete Seeger
#27. When you play the 12-string guitar, you spend half your life tuning the instrument and the other half playing it out of tune.
Pete Seeger
#28. Food is one of the great organizing tools.
Pete Seeger
#29. I have sung for Americans of every political persuasion, and I am proud that I never refuse to sing to an audience, no matter what religion or color of their skin, or situation in life.
Pete Seeger
#30. The truth is a rabbit in a bramble patch. All you can do is circle around and say it's somewhere in there.
Pete Seeger
#31. At the audition, your assignment is to find something new in the song. Something you've never noticed before. A breath carried over, a thought that ties the whole thing together. Then take the risk and do it.
Pete Seeger
#32. Every time I read the paper those old feelings come on.We are waist deep in the Big Muddy and the big fool says to push on.
Pete Seeger
#33. I'd really rather put songs on people's lips than in their ears.
Pete Seeger
#34. 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.
Pete Seeger
#35. My father, Charles Seeger, got me into the Communist movement. He backed out around '38. I drifted out in the 50's.
Pete Seeger
#36. I never intended to make a living from music. That's the funny thing. I wanted to be a journalist.
Pete Seeger
#37. 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.
Pete Seeger
#38. I believe that my choosing my present course I do no dishonor to them, or to those who may come after me.
Pete Seeger
#39. This world is so full of hypocrisy, the only way you can be honest is to be a hermit.
Pete Seeger
#40. Again, I say I will be glad to tell what songs I have ever sung, because singing is my business.
Pete Seeger
#41. Long live teachers of children, because they can show children how they can save the world.
Pete Seeger
#42. You can't work on everything all the time, so start where you are.
Pete Seeger
#43. 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.
Pete Seeger
#44. 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.
Pete Seeger
#45. There is an old Arabic proverb, 'When the king puts the poet on his payroll, he cuts off the tongue of the poet', so throughout the ages, people in power have liked to control music, they used to throw songwriters in jail throughout history, and were assassinated.
Pete Seeger
#46. Many Americans knew their lives and their souls were being struggled for, and they fought for it. And I felt I should carry on.
Pete Seeger
#47. My mother playing the violin and my father and grandfather playing the piano, classical stuff.
Pete Seeger
#48. 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.
Pete Seeger
#49. 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.
Pete Seeger
#50. Most scientists know what needs to be done to save our Earth. But the politicians don't listen to them. They will listen to popular pressure; the people got to supply that.
Pete Seeger
#51. I love my country very dearly, and I greatly resent the implication that some of the places that I have sung and some of the people that I have known, and some of my opinions, whether they are religious or philosophical, make me less of an American.
Pete Seeger
#53. But if two and two and fifty make a million, ...
Pete Seeger
#54. 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.
Pete Seeger
#55. We have more freedom of the press than any other country in a similar position. Even way back in the frightened '50s, Communists, for example, could publish their magazine. The KKK published their own books. But face it, the mass media is controlled by money.
Pete Seeger
#56. Shh. Listen to the sounds that surround you. Notice the pitches, the volume, the timbre, the many lines of counterpoint. As light taught Monet to paint, the earth may be teaching you music.
Pete Seeger
#57. The real meaning of courage was the personal sacrifice of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King.
Pete Seeger
#59. In the largest sense, every work of art is protest ... A lullaby is a propaganda song and any three-year-old knows it ... A hymn is a controversial song - sing one in the wrong church: you'll find out ...
Pete Seeger
#60. 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.
Pete Seeger
#61. Realize that little things lead to bigger things.
Pete Seeger
#62. 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.
Pete Seeger
#63. 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.
Pete Seeger
#64. Get people to sing together and they'll act together too.
Pete Seeger
#65. Alan [Lomax] and his father started off changing the definition of folk music from something ancient and anonymous to something very contemporary.
Pete Seeger
#66. 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.
Pete Seeger
#67. I still prefer to hear [Bob] Dylan acoustic, some of his electric songs are absolutely great. Electric music is the vernacular of the second half of the twentieth century, to use my father's old term.
Pete Seeger
#68. If I've got a talent, it's for picking the right song at the right time for the right audience. And I can always get people to sing with me.
Pete Seeger
#69. Some folklorists just collected dead bones from one graveyard, only to bury them in another, their library.
Pete Seeger
#70. 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.
Pete Seeger
#71. Work in nightclubs was interesting. There were interesting people and places, but by and large, the commercial music experience.
Pete Seeger
#72. But I decline to say who has ever listened to them, who has written them, or other people who have sung them.
Pete Seeger
#73. I used to agree with Kurt Vonnegut, who said that the human race has a snowball's chance in hell of being around a hundred years from now.
Pete Seeger
#76. 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.
Pete Seeger
#77. My mother gave me a ukulele at age eight, and I sang the popular tunes of the day.
Pete Seeger
#78. I feel that my whole life is a contribution.
Pete Seeger
#79. 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.
Pete Seeger
#80. I keep reminding people that an editorial in rhyme is not a song. A good song makes you laugh, it makes you cry, it makes you think.
Pete Seeger
#81. In a world of private property, if something isn't owned by somebody, it's going to be misused by somebody else.
Pete Seeger
#82. To live you have to experiment, to have the ability to experiment you have to have confidence, to have confidence you have to be loved, to be loved you have to love.
Pete Seeger
#83. You have a right to your opinion and I've got a right to mine. Period.
Pete Seeger
#84. 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?
Pete Seeger
#85. 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.
Pete Seeger
#86. 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, and I do this voluntarily.
Pete Seeger
#87. When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn?
Pete Seeger
#88. 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.
Pete Seeger
#89. If it can't be reduced, reused, repaired, rebuilt, refurbished, refinished, resold, recycled or composted, then it should be restricted, redesigned or removed from production.
Pete Seeger
#90. 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.
Pete Seeger
#91. Most conservatives just want to turn back the clock to a time before the income tax - 100 years or so. I would like to turn the clock back thousands of years to a time when people lived in small communities and took care of each other.
Pete Seeger
#92. This banjo surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.
Pete Seeger
#93. 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."
Pete Seeger
#94. The world would never amount to a hill of beans if people didn't use their imaginations to think of the impossible.
Pete Seeger
#95. I think folk music helps reinforce your sense of history. An old song makes you think of times gone by.
Pete Seeger
#96. It's been my belief that learning how to do something in your hometown is the most important thing.
Pete Seeger
#97. 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.
Pete Seeger
#98. It's a terrible thing being a patriarch. I don't even have a gray beard. But people keep calling me up for advice.
Pete Seeger
#99. 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.
Pete Seeger
#100. 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.
Pete Seeger
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