Top 100 Guthrie's Quotes
#1. The Gulf Stream waters of Woody Guthrie's famous song were strung with columns of oil that were several miles long.
James Lee Burke
#2. A lot of Woody Guthrie's songs were taken from other songs. He would rework the melody and lyrics, and all of a sudden it was a Woody Guthrie song.
John Mellencamp
#3. Greed and globalization aren't just America's fault.
Arlo Guthrie
#4. Along with a sense of humor, my songs have to be sincere, and they have to be sung from a position of inner conviction.
Arlo Guthrie
#5. There is very little in civilized life that demands everything you got intellectually, physically, and emotionally. Driving is living. It's aggressive instead of passive living.
Janet Guthrie
#6. Irish fathers still have certain responsibilities, and by the time my two daughters turned seven, they could swim, ride a bike, sing at least one part of a Woody Guthrie song, and recite all of W. B. Yeats's 'The Song of Wandering Aengus.'
Adrian McKinty
#7. The mental powers acquire their full robustness when the cheek loses its ruddy hue, and the limbs their elastic step; and pale thought sits on manly brows, and the watchman, as he walks his rounds, sees the student's lamp burning far into the silent night.
Thomas Guthrie
#8. You don't need spirituality to discover the troubles that come your way. But, it's good to know that troubles are not unique to you alone.
Arlo Guthrie
#9. I have all kinds of lovely ideas for games and the like." She glanced at Guthrie. "None require swordplay."
Guthrie shook his head. "Where's the fun in that?
Terry Spear
#11. I don't want a pickle, just want to ride on my motorsickle.
Arlo Guthrie
#12. Now as through this world I ramble, I see lots of funny men, Some rob you with a six gun, And some with a fountain pen.
Woody Guthrie
#13. I don't think I have any right to say I belong to that [Woody Guthrie/Bob Dylan tradition]. I think that's something that eventually maybe you get inducted into. I'm just experimenting.
Justin Townes Earle
#14. Any fool can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple.
Woody Guthrie
#15. All about a human being is, it's a great big hoping machine.
Woody Guthrie
#16. Nobody living can ever stop me. As I go walking my freedom highway. Nobody living can make me turn back. This land was made for you and me.
Woody Guthrie
#19. If Woody Guthrie set the bar for American songwriters, Bob Dylan jumped right over it. No one I know will ever come close to possessing the beauty of melody and the use of language that Dylan shares with us, with ease.
John Mellencamp
#20. I'm not just a singer-songwriter doing songs in the key of me.
Arlo Guthrie
#21. It's round the world I've traveled; it's round the world I've roamed; but I've yet to see an outlaw drive a family from its home
Woody Guthrie
#22. I'd rather have friends who care than friends who agree with me.
Arlo Guthrie
#23. Coming into Los Angeles, bringing in a couple of keys. Don't touch my bags, if you please Mr. Customs man.
Arlo Guthrie
#24. Be serious. Folk songs are serious. That's what Pete Seeger told me. Arlo, I only wanna tell you one thing. Folk songs are serious. And I said Right.
Arlo Guthrie
#25. You can't have a light without a dark to stick it in.
Arlo Guthrie
#26. Though I acted in hundreds of productions, appeared at the Guthrie Theatre and on Broadway in Amadeus, I discovered in my thirties that I didn't really like stage acting. The presence of the audience, the eight shows a week and the possibility of a long run were all unnatural to me.
Fred Melamed
#27. It is a matter of spirit, not strength. It is a matter of doing your best each little moment. There's never a break. You must have desire, a very intense desire to keep going.
Janet Guthrie
#28. A folk song is what's wrong and how to fix it or it could be
who's hungry and where their mouth is or
who's out of work and where the job is or
who's broke and where the money is or
who's carrying a gun and where the peace is.
Woody Guthrie
#29. There's several ways of saying what's on your mind. And in states and counties where it ain't too healthy to talk too loud, speak your mind, or even vote like you want to, folks have found other ways of getting the word around. One of the mainest ways is by singing.
Woody Guthrie
#30. It sounds like something from a Woody Guthrie song, but it's true; I was raised in a freight car.
Merle Haggard
#31. We went back, afterward, after the show was over that night, I took my kids backstage and said, You know what? I know my dad's songs ...
Arlo Guthrie
#32. My mother had introduced me to a lot of my father's friends because she believed that I would get to know the guy my dad was better through his friends than just in the hospital visits.
Arlo Guthrie
#33. Santa Claus wears a Red Suit, he must be a communist. And a beard and long hair, must be a pacifist. What's in that pipe that he's smoking?
Arlo Guthrie
#34. Songs are like fish. You just gotta have your line in the water. And it's a bad idea to fish downstream from Bob Dylan.
Arlo Guthrie
#35. Everyone has a responsibility to not only tolerate another person's point of view, but also to accept it eagerly as a challenge to your own understanding. And express those challenges in terms of serving other people.
Arlo Guthrie
#36. You wanna start a fire I've got the coal, that's what history is to me. And it attracts the right person to do something with it to create the next fire. And fires are fuel and food and energy and life.
Nora Guthrie
#38. The freedom graciously granted to God's people is an invitation not to license but to a life of significance, holiness, beauty, and service.
Stan Guthrie
#39. It's a folk singer's job to comfort disturbed people and to disturb comfortable people
Woody Guthrie
#40. The New York State Freeway's closed, man. Far out!
Arlo Guthrie
#41. Now as I look around, it's mighty plain to see,
This world is such a great and a funny place to be.
Oh, the gamblin' man is rich, an' the workin' man is poor,
And I ain't got no home in this world anymore.
Woody Guthrie
#42. The cry of distress lays hold of our Lord's omnipotence. It is as easy for God to supply thy greatest as thy smallest wants, even as it was within His power to form a system or an atom, to create a blazing sun as to kindle the fire-fly's lamp.
Thomas Guthrie
#43. I got started in Oklahoma. That's where I was born. Population down there is one-third Indians, one-third Negroes and one-third white people.
Woody Guthrie
#44. There's only one God. Call him whatever you want.
Arlo Guthrie
#45. No Judgment = No Expectations: That's my motto.
Arlo Guthrie
#46. Probably my two biggest musical influences were the Everly Brothers and the Beatles, in chronological order. Both of them have had a very simple-sounding musical style that's actually quite complex as far as popular songs are concerned.
Arlo Guthrie
#47. Folk music is music that everyday people can play, and it inspired a lot of people to make their own music. That trailed into making your own pop music, and that's why garage bands started springing up everywhere.
Arlo Guthrie
#48. Democracy doesn't begin at the top; it begins at the bottom, when flesh-and-blood human beings fight to rekindle what Arlo Guthrie calls 'The Patriot's Dream.
Bill Moyers
#49. The death of what's dead is the birth of what's living.
Arlo Guthrie
#50. It's about the time I was riding my Motorcycle, going down a mountain road at 150 miles an hour, playing my guitar.
Arlo Guthrie
#51. One of the things I love about New York is that it's one of the only places where you could have an entire restaurant dedicated to macaroni and cheese.
Savannah Guthrie
#52. My dad's songs were really written to make certain people feel as though they had some kind of value. Because they were told from where they work and from the countries they had immigrated from that they did not.
Arlo Guthrie
#53. A sunny temper [an attitude of gratitude for what blessings and mercies there are] gilds the edges of life's blackest cloud.
Thomas Guthrie
#54. I played around our yard some and talked to the fence posts, sung songs and made the weeds sing ... - WOODY GUTHRIE
Richard Louv
#55. That your own interpretation of a work of art is flagrantly subjective seems to be regarded as an arrogant attitude. But the truer view is that the interpretative artist can only make his own comment upon the work.
Tyrone Guthrie
#56. Nouns and verbs are the guts of the language. Beware of covering up with adjectives and adverbs.
A.B. Guthrie Jr.
#57. Religion is the mortar that binds society together; the granite pedestal of liberty; the strong backbone of the social system.
Thomas Guthrie
#58. My only description for me is that there's no throwaway people. That's the creed that I live by. It doesn't matter if I'm singing or not. That's the kind of person that my father and mother wanted me to be. The end obligation is to make people feel good about who they are.
Arlo Guthrie
#59. Let me ask you. If someone called you and offered you a ride in the Indianapolis 500 and you were a male race car driver, would you turn the ride down?
Janet Guthrie
#60. Even with politics, stuff comes around again. Woody Guthrie would recognize America today.
Billy Bragg
#61. I think of my parents as a single unit, and it's interesting because they shared so much, and they were totally opposite. My mother, a Martha Graham dancer, had a classical background; my father had a back-porch background.
Arlo Guthrie
#62. In a phone interview in 1994, Celia Powell stressed two sentiments: music was her father's life; it was the driving force of his existence, in her opinion. And she thought the music industry had very much taken advantage of him.121
Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr.
#63. If we fix it so's you can't make money on war, we'll all forget what we're killing folks for.
Woody Guthrie
#64. What I'm doing is basically the same as Bob Dylan did with folk songs and Woody Guthrie songs, the same as folk music's always done. I'm not going to sing about ploughing, but I'll write a song that sounds like it should be about ploughing.
Justin Townes Earle
#65. The Christian is like the ripening corn; the riper he grows the more lowly he bends his head.
Alfred Bertram Guthrie
#66. I never have any clothes to go out in, because I always just buy for work. I don't know why. Habit.
Savannah Guthrie
#67. Sailors didn't train for hurricanes, because they weren't supposed to be in hurricanes.
Julian Guthrie
#69. Like most kids, I grew up singing 'This Land Is Your Land' in grammar school, but with the most radical verses neatly removed. This was before I knew it was a Woody Guthrie song.
Steve Earle
#70. My father was a painter. There was a lot of singing. We hung around with a lot of folk musicians. My family knew a lot of great folk musicians of the time, like Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, Leadbelly. They were all people we knew.
Alan Arkin
#71. I went to a performance of 'The Crucible' at the Guthrie when I was a sophomore in high school, and I knew right away that that's what I wanted to do.
John Hawkes
#72. Renaissance cowboy/raconteur Pop Wagner ... deadpan funny ... his presence is like meeting Woody Guthrie and Will Rogers riding a single, many colored horse. Pop is a kind of 'textile genius' who is able to spin, at once, both yarn and rope.
Ron Miles
#73. If you want to learn something, just steal it.
Woody Guthrie
#74. It is not with a rush and a spring that we are to reach Christ's character, and attain to perfect saintship; but step by step, foot by foot, hand over hand, we are slowly and often painfully to mount the ladder that rests on earth, and rises to heaven.
Thomas Guthrie
#75. Left wing, chicken wing, it don't make no difference to me.
Woody Guthrie
#76. Everywhere I go, I see all kinds of people at my shows - conservatives, liberals, new-agers, teen-agers, old pensioners. And for those people to have something in common is real interesting to me.
Arlo Guthrie
#77. People were talking about songs of the common man in order to make the common man. With Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly, they were so common it was just uncommon.
Arlo Guthrie
#78. I've been singing this song now for twenty five minutes. I could sing it for another twenty five minutes. I'm not proud ... or tired.
Arlo Guthrie
#79. I froze in time! And I thought My God ... I'm free!
Arlo Guthrie
#80. The most profound, life-altering gift you can offer the Indie writer you love is to TELL as MANY avid readers as you are able.
R.S. Guthrie
#81. But I also think that once you've found stuff that works, stop reading forums, stop reading reviews and just get out there and play.
Guthrie Govan
#82. I don't do anything on stage that allows me to become a trained seal, where you're just doing the same thing over and over.
Arlo Guthrie
#83. You could listen to Woody Guthrie songs and actually learn how to live ...
Bob Dylan
#84. In writing songs, I've learned as much from Cezanne as I have from Woody Guthrie.
Bob Dylan
#85. Perserverance: Outlasting the most rash, pessimistic, cowardly naysayers; those first in line to deny us the dreams never tried. Ourselves.
R.S. Guthrie
#86. You teach kids how to succeed when they successfully foil the educational system.
Arlo Guthrie
#87. I fell in love with folk music at Surprise Lake Camp. It was the songs of Woody Guthrie and the Weavers.
Neil Diamond
#88. Everyone has troubles. Finding yourself in the same boat with everyone else is the first sign of spirituality.
Arlo Guthrie
#89. With the advent of radio and recording, music became an industry rather than just a tradition.
Arlo Guthrie
#90. The more the diamond is cut the brighter it sparkles; and in what seems hard dealing, there God has no end in view but to perfect His people.
Thomas Guthrie
#91. Yes, I was born in Coney Island. The Holy Land.
Arlo Guthrie
#92. I'm trying to set out the passion and complexity of this sport. Many people think it's a dumb activity: stand on the gas and turn left. In fact, it's probably one of the most complex sports in existence.
Janet Guthrie
#93. Celtic music is part of the language in Scotland and Ireland, where every kid and grandparent knows those songs, music by the likes of Woody Guthrie and Hank Snow is getting entrenched here. They are part of our cultural language. It's part of a living treasure. It doesn't just belong to a museum.
Rosanne Cash
#94. The best way to get to know any bunch of people is to go and listen to their music.
Woody Guthrie
#95. If you steal from one person is Theft, and if you steal from Lots of people is Research
Guthrie Govan
#96. Anyone who uses more than two chords is just showing off.
Woody Guthrie
#98. But think of the last guy. For one minute, think of the last guy. Nobody's got it worse than that guy. Nobody in the whole world.
Arlo Guthrie
#99. If you play more than two chords, you're showing off.
Woody Guthrie
#100. We live in an increasingly sophisticated world that makes it difficult to make simple comments on stuff. There are too many people on both sides of the border who are taking advantage of circumstances and the situation.
Arlo Guthrie
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