Utah Phillips Quotes

#1. What I really learned in the army was how to be a pacifist.

Utah Phillips

#2. Yes, the long memory is the most radical idea in this country. It is the loss of that long memory which deprives our people of that connective flow of thoughts and events that clarifies our vision, not of where we're going, but where we want to go.

Utah Phillips

#3. I tramped. When I was on the freight trains, I wasn't looking for work. I was looking to go from place to place without paying any money.

Utah Phillips

#4. I have seen that our best presidents were the do-nothing presidents: Millard Fillmore, Warren G. Harding. When you have a president who does things, we are all in serious trouble. If he does anything at all, if he gets up at night to go the bathroom, somehow, mystically, trouble will ensue.

Utah Phillips

#5. Folk music isn't owned by anybody. It is owned by everybody, like the national parks, the postal system, and the school system. It's our common property. There is nobody's name on it. Nobody can make money on it. It's not copywritten.

Utah Phillips

#6. Children, be worried when they call you America's most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what they've done to the other natural resources?

Utah Phillips

#7. Every good educator knows that true teaching is to teach kids how to ask the right questions.

Utah Phillips

#8. The state can't give you freedom, and the state can't take it away. You're
born with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Freedom is something you
assume, then you wait for someone to try to take it away. The degree to
which you resist is the degree to which you are free ...

Utah Phillips

#9. Oh, mercy, I think we're all storytellers, you know. You think of the excuses you told your parents for why you got home late. I just never gave it up.

Utah Phillips

#10. The most American thing you can do is to stifle dissent.

Utah Phillips

#11. Cause the profit system follows the path of least resistance and following the path of least resistance is what makes the river crooked. Hmmmm.

Utah Phillips

#12. When I was in Utah there, first learning the kind of music I love, my favorite singer was T. Texas Tyler. So my friend, Norman Ritchie, the traveling teenage sage, started calling me U. Utah Phillips.

Utah Phillips

#13. Chris Chandler is the best performance poet I have ever seen.

Utah Phillips

#14. Laurie Lewis' songs combine passion and sheer craft in a way you don't hear very often. Whatever country music is supposed to be, she's at the center of it.

Utah Phillips

#15. It's nice to know there are some things in early 21st-century post-industrial culture that don't change very fast. I am one of those.

Utah Phillips

#16. I don't need fame and I don't need power and I don't need wealth. I'm in need of friends, which I have found in abundance.

Utah Phillips

#17. I guarantee, that if I am elected, I will take over the White House, hang out, shoot pool, scratch my ass, and not do a damn thing ... Which is to say, if you want something done, don't come to me to do it for you; you got to get together and figure out how to do it yourselves. Is that a deal?

Utah Phillips

#18. But they lived those extraordinary lives that can never be lived again. And in the living of them, they gave me a history that is more profound, more beautiful, more powerful, more passionate, and ultimately more useful, than the best damn history book I ever read.

Utah Phillips

#19. I'm here to change the world, and if I am not, I am probably wasting my time.

Utah Phillips

#20. The Earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses.

Utah Phillips

#21. The most important movement in the world is the feminist movement. If we can really figure out what's going on between men and women, the other problems will take care of themselves. I'm sure of it.

Utah Phillips

#22. When you have an engagement, at least in my world, the world that I create for myself, an engagement doesn't begin when you hit the stage and end when you leave the stage. It begins when you hit the city limits, and it ends when you leave the city limits.

Utah Phillips

#23. It is better to be likable than to be talented.

Utah Phillips

#24. As I have said so often before, the long memory is the most radical idea in America ... .

Utah Phillips

#25. I created my own party. It's called the Sloth and Indolence Party, and I'm running as an anarchist candidate in the best sense of that word. I've studied the presidency carefully.

Utah Phillips