Seeger Quotes

#1. Influenced by Pete Seeger and the Weavers, McLean proudly wore the mantle of troubadour in the early 1970s, when 'American Pie' topped the Billboard charts, and has never shed the cape.

Douglas Brinkley

#2. We all know the types who listen to Pete Seeger songs; even Pete admits they aren't interesting.

P. J. O'Rourke

#3. I heard Pete Seeger records when I was a kid. I saw Bob Dylan when I was about 12. The first song I ever learned to play was a song by Phil Ochs.

Ketch Secor

#4. I was raised on Josh White, the Weavers and Pete Seeger. The music was everywhere. You'd go to a party at somebody's apartment and there would be fifty people there, singing well into the night.

Mary Travers

#5. I think we have responsibilities to be active in the things we believe in, regardless of what our job is. At least in my lifetime, there has been a tremendous combining of activism and music, that came up in the era of Pete Seeger and the Weavers and Joan Baez and Bob Dylan and Peter Paul & Mary.

Bonnie Raitt

#6. 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

#7. My finger picking is sort of a cross between Pete Seeger, Earl Scruggs, and total incompetence.

Jimmy Page

#8. I actually learned the guitar with the help of a Pete Seeger instructional record when I was 13 or 14.

David Gilmour

#9. I think art can really serve to inspire a movement - and, of course, it has in the past. The Civil Rights movement wouldn't have the same resonance without the songs from everyone from Pete Seeger to Odetta to James Brown.

Saul Williams

#10. My father, Charles Seeger, got me into the Communist movement. He backed out around '38. I drifted out in the 50's.

Pete Seeger

#11. Yes. My mother was and still is a Folk Singer. She was very involved in the political movements for Unions and Civil rights. She sang with Pete Seeger among others. My father was an Actor.

Vicki Sue Robinson

#12. Look em in the eye. Make a gesture of inclusion, which he did all the time. And above all, have a chorus. So I learned from Pete Seeger to have something for them to sing.

Tom Paxton

#13. My musical heroes are people like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie who wrote and sang real songs for real people; for everyone, old, young, and in between.

Tom Chapin

#14. was "Night Moves" by Bob Seeger. This, he

Mary McNear

#15. I learned that opening myself to my own love and to life's tough loveliness not only was the most delicious, amazing thing on earth but also was quantum. It would radiate out to a cold, hungry world. Beautiful moments heal, as do real cocoa, Pete Seeger, a walk on old fire roads.

Anne Lamott

#16. Pete Seeger is a modest, unassuming, cheerful, and kind-natured man. He's a good folk singer, if you can stand folk singing. And he's such an excellent banjo player that you almost don't wish you had a pair of wire cutters.

P. J. O'Rourke

#17. I've studied a lot of great people over the years - Pete Seeger, James Brown - and tried to incorporate elements that I've admired, though I can't say I dance like James.

John Fogerty

#18. We Shall Overcome by Pete Seeger. I remember that moment with crystal clarity and I comprehend it as a turning point in my life: a moment terrible in its illumination of a toad in my soul, an ugliness so pervasive that it seemed my insides were vomit.

Pat Conroy

#19. Well, normally I'm against big things. I think the world is going to be saved by millions of small things. Too many things can go wrong when they get big. - Pete Seeger (on how he felt about attending his big 90th birthday bash last year)

Pete Seeger

#20. 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

#21. Hope that there are many, many small leaders.

Pete Seeger

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. Education is what you get when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get if you don't.

Pete Seeger

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

Pete Seeger

#28. If I had an axe on the evening at Newport when [Dylan] broke out the electric guitar, I'd have cut his cable.

Pete Seeger

#29. So die as though your funeral
Ushered you through the doors that led
Into a stately banquet hall
Where heroes banqueted.

Alan Seeger

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

Pete Seeger

#31. 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

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

Pete Seeger

#33. I have a rendezvous with death ... I will not fail that rendezvous

Alan Seeger

#34. And this is the origin of pop music: it's a professional music which draws upon both folk music and fine arts music as well.

Pete Seeger

#35. 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

#36. Music has always had the ability to comfort and inspire.

Pete Seeger

#37. Parents are the hardest-working members of the population. But they do it for the highest wages. Kisses.

Pete Seeger

#38. Oft as by chance, a little while apart The pall of empty, loveless hours withdrawn, Sweet Beauty, opening on the impoverished heart, Beams like a jewel on the breast of dawn.

Alan Seeger

#39. 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

#40. Songs won't save the planet, but neither will books or speeches.

Pete Seeger

#41. RULERS should be careful about what songs are allowed to be sung.

Pete Seeger

#42. All the arts, music, the visual arts, acting and dancing arts, cooking arts, and I believe sports, will save the human race because they can leap over barriers, religions, leap over barriers of race, politics.

Pete Seeger

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

Pete Seeger

#44. 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

#45. 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

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

Pete Seeger

#47. Being generous of spirit is a wonderful way to live.

Pete Seeger

#48. 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.

Pete Seeger

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. It was only through the years that I realized what an absolutely extraordinarily thoughtful person Dr. King was.

Pete Seeger

#53. Historically, I believe I was correct in refusing to answer their questions.

Pete Seeger

#54. 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

#55. Throughout history the leaders of the countries have been very particular about what songs should be sung. We know the power of songs.

Pete Seeger

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

Pete Seeger

#57. 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

#58. Any idiot can be complicated. It takes a genius to be simple.

Pete Seeger

#59. The world will be saved by people fighting for their homes.

Pete Seeger

#60. The world will be solved by millions of small things.

Pete Seeger

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. I get up each morning, gather my wits, pick up the paper and read the obits. If I'm not there, I know I'm not dead, so I eat a good breakfast and go back to bed.

Pete Seeger

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

Pete Seeger

#65. 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

#66. Food is one of the great organizing tools.

Pete Seeger

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. I'd really rather put songs on people's lips than in their ears.

Pete Seeger

#72. 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

#73. A productive mistake is: (1) made in the service of mission and vision; (2) acknowledged as a mistake; (3) learned from; (4) considered valuable; (5) shared for the benefit of all.

Pete Seeger

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

Pete Seeger

#75. I have to resist the temptation to want to learn everything. You know, you can't. You have to restrict yourself at some time, or else you find yourself just being spread too thin. And already I think I try too many things.

Pete Seeger

#76. 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

#77. We all go to different churches or no churches, we have different favorite foods, different ways of making love, different ways of doing all sorts of things, but there we're all singing together. Gives you hope.

Pete Seeger

#78. I believe that my choosing my present course I do no dishonor to them, or to those who may come after me.

Pete Seeger

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

Pete Seeger

#80. In the sixties, during the Vietnam war, when anarchists and pacifists and socialists, Democrats and Republicans, decent-hearted Americans, all recoiled with horror at the bloodbath, we came together.

Pete Seeger

#81. Again, I say I will be glad to tell what songs I have ever sung, because singing is my business.

Pete Seeger

#82. Long live teachers of children, because they can show children how they can save the world.

Pete Seeger

#83. 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.

Pete Seeger

#84. Make the kind of music you love even if you never hear it on the air. This was the basic lesson I'd gotten from Alan [Lomax]. Alan said, Pete, look at all this great music around. You never hear it on the radio, but it's right there, great music.

Pete Seeger

#85. You can't work on everything all the time, so start where you are.

Pete Seeger

#86. 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

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

Pete Seeger

#88. 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

#89. 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

#90. Songwriters can't explain. You get an idea and you don't know where it's come from. And if you're lucky, you have a pencil or pen and can write it down.

Pete Seeger

#91. Song, songs kept them going and going; They didn't realize the millions of seeds they were sowing. They were singing in marches, even singing in jail. Songs gave them the courage to believe they would not fail.

Pete Seeger

#92. 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

#93. My mother playing the violin and my father and grandfather playing the piano, classical stuff.

Pete Seeger

#94. 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

#95. A good song reminds us what we're fighting for.

Pete Seeger

#96. 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

#97. One of the things I'm most proud of about my country is the fact that we did lick McCarthyism back in the fifties.

Pete Seeger

#98. 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

#99. My dad, the old professor, used to say, 'Never get into an argument about what's folk music and what isn't.'

Pete Seeger

#100. 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