Pete Seeger famous quotes

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

#People #Village #Care

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.
-- Pete Seeger

#Song #Writing #Kids

It's a very important thing to learn to talk to people you disagree with.
-- Pete Seeger

#Teamwork #People #Important

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.
-- Pete Seeger

#Country #Song #Mistake

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

#Optimistic #Keys #World

It's been my belief that learning how to do something in your hometown is the most important thing.
-- Pete Seeger

#Important #Belief #Hometown

I'd really rather put songs on people's lips than in their ears.
-- Pete Seeger

#Song #People #Ears

The first step in solving a problem is admitting there is a problem to be solved.
-- Pete Seeger

#Firsts #Steps #Admitting

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

#Environmental #Should

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

#Thinking #Temptation #Finding Yourself

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

#Inspirational #Education #Humor

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

#People #Advice #Calling

The easiest way to avoid wrong notes is to never open your mouth and sing. What a mistake that would be.
-- Pete Seeger

#Mistake #Mouths #Way

I remember someone once saying, "Pete, you know you really should take voice lessons." And I said, "Well, if I could find any voice teacher that could teach me to sing like Lead Belly I'd spend every cent to study under him." But every time you'd go to a voice teacher, he'd teach you to warble, as if you'd want to be an opera singer, and that's not what I'm interested in.
-- Pete Seeger

#Teacher #Voice #Lessons

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!
-- Pete Seeger

#Spring #Years #Two

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

#Funny Things #Wanted #Journalist

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

#Jobs #World #May

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

#School #Years #Play

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

#Thinking #Imagination #People

I was about 16 years old years when my father took me to a square dance festival in North Carolina. For the first time in my life, I found there was music in my country that you never heard on the radio, and you didn't hear on the juke boxes, and in theaters. I fell in love with it, especially the long-necked banjos.
-- Pete Seeger

#Country #Father #Squares

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

#Teaching #Light #Shh

In the United States, many people said you can't have folk music in the United States because you don't have any peasant class. But the funny thing was, there were literally thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who loved old time fiddling, ballads, banjo tunes, blues played on the guitar, spirituals and gospel hymns. These songs and music didn't fit into any neat category of art music nor popular music nor jazz. So gradually they said well let's call it folk music.
-- Pete Seeger

#Song #Art #Guitar

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

#Song #Aggravation #People

I fought for peace in the fifties.
-- Pete Seeger

Some may find them merely diverting melodies. Others may find them incitements to Red revolution. And who will say if either or both is wrong? Not I.
-- Pete Seeger

#May #Red #Revolution

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

#Writing #Ideas #Lucky

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

#Song #Jobs #Library

I feel most spiritual when I'm out in the woods. I feel part of nature. Or looking up at the stars. [I used to say] I was an atheist. Now I say, it's all according to your definition of God. According to my definition of God, I'm not an atheist. Because I think God is everything. Whenever I open my eyes.
-- Pete Seeger

#Spiritual #Atheist #Stars

He [Alan Lomax] started right off trying to find people who could introduce folk songs to city people. He found a young actor named Burl Ives and said, "Burl, you know a lot of great country songs learned from your grandmother, don't you know people would love to hear them?" He put on radio programs. He persuaded CBS to dedicate "The School of the Air" for one year to American folk music. He'd get some old sailor to sing an old sea shanty with a cracked voice. Then he'd get me to sing it with my banjo.
-- Pete Seeger

#Country #Song #School

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

#Technology #Firsts #Wipe

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

#Country #Kids #Race

When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn?
-- Pete Seeger

#Learning

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

#Helping #Hell

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

#Song #Believe #Jail

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

#Song #Father #Use

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

#Music #Song #Funny Things

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

#Library #Bones #Graveyard

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.
-- Pete Seeger

#Feet #People #Three

Looking back, I think I tried to be too eclectic. Sometimes I'd sing thirty songs, and fifteen of them were not in English.
-- Pete Seeger

#Song #Thinking #Fifteen

Every time I'm in the woods, i feel like I'm in church
-- Pete Seeger

#Church #Woods #Feels

Anybody who wants to learn everything is pretty stupid. You learn what you can.
-- Pete Seeger

#Stupid #Want

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

#Thinking #World #Small Things

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

#Air #Lessons #Radio

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

#Kissing #Parent #Wages

Work in nightclubs was interesting. There were interesting people and places, but by and large, the commercial music experience.
-- Pete Seeger

#Interesting #People #Nightclubs

Down through the centuries, this trick has been tried by various establishments throughout the world. They force people to get involved in the kind of examination that has only one aim and that is to stamp out dissent.
-- Pete Seeger

#People #World #Examination

Now any person who plays an acoustic guitar standing up on stage with a microphone is a folk singer. Some grandmother with a baby in her arms singing a 500-year-old song, well, she's not a folk singer, she's not on stage with a guitar and a microphone. No, she's just an old grandmother singing an old song. The term "folk singer" has gotten warped.
-- Pete Seeger

#Song #Baby #Grandmother

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.
-- Pete Seeger

#Religious #Philosophical #Political

Alan [Lomax] and his father started off changing the definition of folk music from something ancient and anonymous to something very contemporary.
-- Pete Seeger

#Father #Definitions #Ancient

A good song reminds us what we're fighting for.
-- Pete Seeger

#Song #Fighting

Realize that little things lead to bigger things.
-- Pete Seeger

#Littles #Realizing #Little Things

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

#Queens #Kings #Europe

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

#Children #School #Singing

I was 16 when I came to New York. I had graduated to a tenor banjo in the school jazz band, and it was kind of boring - just chords, chords, chords. Then my father took me to a mountain music and dance festival in Asheville, North Carolina, and there I saw relatively uneducated people playing great music by ear.
-- Pete Seeger

#New York #Father #School

I feel that my whole life is a contribution.
-- Pete Seeger

#Life Is #Whole Life #Feels

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

#Thinking #Freedom Of Speech #Culture

There is no such thing as a wrong note ... just as long as you're singing along.
-- Pete Seeger

#Long #Singing #Notes

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

#Plato #Republic #Doe

Hope that there are many, many small leaders.
-- Pete Seeger

#Leader

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

#Kings #Cutting #Jail

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

#Russia #Church #Politics

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

#Sports #Art #Believe

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

#Hobos #Proud #Jungle

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

#Country #Book #Media

Being generous of spirit is a wonderful way to live.
-- Pete Seeger

#Life #Giving #Way

The first country conquered by any dictator is his own country.
-- Pete Seeger

#Country #Firsts #Dictator

And there's a wonderful parable in the New Testament: The sower scatters seeds. Some seeds fall in the pathway and get stamped on, and they don't grow. Some fall on the rocks, and they don't grow. But some seeds fall on fallow ground, and they grow and multiply a thousandfold. Who knows where some good little thing that you've done may bring results years later that you never dreamed of?
-- Pete Seeger

#Fall #Years #Rocks

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

#Years #People #Community

Food is one of the great organizing tools.
-- Pete Seeger

#Tools

After visits to several Communist countries (USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Slovenia, East Germany, Vietnam, China, Cuba), I feel strongly that most "revolutionary" types around the world don't realize the importance of freedom of the press and the air, a right to peaceably assemble and discuss anything, including the dangers of such discussions.
-- Pete Seeger

#Country #Air #Cuba

This banjo surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.
-- Pete Seeger

#Hate #Surrender #Force

Sometimes you find an old tune so good you can use it several times for different purposes.
-- Pete Seeger

#Different #Purpose #Use

Long live teachers of children, because they can show children how they can save the world.
-- Pete Seeger

#Teacher #Children #Long

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

#Men #Thinking #Everyday

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

#Color #Political #Religion

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

#Song #Writing #Thinking

I think folk music helps reinforce your sense of history. An old song makes you think of times gone by.
-- Pete Seeger

#Song #Thinking #Make You Think

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

#Thinking #Years #World

There is something about participating; it is almost my religion. If the world is still here in 100 years, people will know the importance of participating, not just being spectators. Millions of small groups around the world, that don't necessarily all agree with one another, are made up of people who are not just sitting back waiting for someone to do things for them. No one can prove anything, but of course if I didn't believe it had some kind of power, I wouldn't be trying to do it.
-- Pete Seeger

#Believe #Years #People

Songs won't save the planet, but neither will books or speeches.
-- Pete Seeger

#Song #Book #Speech

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.
-- Pete Seeger

#Believe #Men #Thinking

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

#Income #Conservative #Clock

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

#Mirrors #Tree #House

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

#Country #Years #Names

My mother gave me a ukulele at age eight, and I sang the popular tunes of the day.
-- Pete Seeger

#Mother #Ukulele #Eight

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."
-- Pete Seeger

#Song #Father #Thinking

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

#Country #Song #Library

I would ask, "How can one have a technological society without research? How can one have research without researching dangerous areas? How can one research dangerous areas without uncovering dangerous information? How can you uncover dangerous information without it falling into the hands of insane people who will sooner or later destroy the human race, if not the whole of life on earth?" Who knows? God only knows!
-- Pete Seeger

#Fall #Race #Hands

My mother playing the violin and my father and grandfather playing the piano, classical stuff.
-- Pete Seeger

#Mother #Father #Piano

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.
-- Pete Seeger

#Years #Luxury #Answers

I believe that all technological societies tend to self-destruct. The reason is that the very things that make us a successful technological society, such as our curiosity, our ambition and determination, will also cause us to fall.
-- Pete Seeger

#Determination #Fall #Believe

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

#Believe #Thinking #Next

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

#Hypocrisy #World #Way

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

#Song #Struggle #People

I was never enthusiastic about being somebody who was supposed to be silent about being a member of something.
-- Pete Seeger

#Silent #Members #Enthusiastic

It was only through the years that I realized what an absolutely extraordinarily thoughtful person Dr. King was.
-- Pete Seeger

#Kings #Thoughtful #Years

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

#Song #Art #Years

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

#Art #Pops #Fine

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

#Feelings #Fool #Paper

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 seem to get people to sing with me.
-- Pete Seeger

#Song #People #Talent