Alan Lomax famous quotes

We now have cultural machines so powerful that one singer can reach everybody in the world, and make all the other singers feel inferior because they're not like him. Once that gets started, he gets backed by so much cash and so much power that he becomes a monstrous invader from outer space, crushing the life out of all the other human possibilities. My life has been devoted to opposing that tendency.
-- Alan Lomax

#Crush #Powerful #Space

The essence of America lies not in the headlined heroes...but in the everyday folks who live and die unknown, yet leave their dreams as legacies
-- Alan Lomax

#Dream #Lying #Hero

And the thing that I always tried to do with important singers when I met them was to sit down and record everything they knew, give them a first real run-through of their art.
-- Alan Lomax

#Running #Art #Real

I knew Bobby Dylan back in the days when he lived in the village. He used to come and see me and sing songs for me, saying they ought to go into my next collected book on American folk music.
-- Alan Lomax

#Song #Book #Village

The modern computer with all its various gadgets and wonderful electronic facilities now makes it possible to preserve and reinvigorate all the cultural richness of mankind.
-- Alan Lomax

#Gadgets #Computer #Wonderful

People were saying that Southern folk song was dead, that the land that had produced American jazz, the blues, the spirituals, the mountain ballads and the work songs had gone sterile.
-- Alan Lomax

#Song #Land #People

The dimension of cultural equity needs to be added to the humane continuum of liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and social justice.
-- Alan Lomax

#Justice #Freedom Of Speech #Liberty

Folk Music is the map of singing.
-- Alan Lomax

#Singing #Maps #Music Is

From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia...could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.

So many forces and resources would become available if States, aware (or conscious) of their true (or real) mission, would want to get on (or agree) to abolish every politics aiming at ("visant à", Fr.) expansion or hegemony; system that maintain among nations a a perpetual distrust and tension, impose on them (or force or compel, "leur impose", Fr.) formidable armies and crushing war budgets.

Love, being in love, isn’t a constant thing. It doesn’t always flow at the same strength. It’s not always like a river in flood. It’s more like the sea. It has tides, it ebbs and flows. The thing is, when love is real, whether it’s ebbing or flowing, it’s always there, it never goes away. And that’s the only proof you can have that it is real, and not just a crush or an infatuation or a passing fancy

When God wants to do an impossible task, he takes an impossible man, and he crushes him.

I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.

If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?

All we have is our vote. But it's powerful.

The ultimate Consciousness is always present everywhere. It is beyond space and time, with not before or after. It is undeniable and obvious. So what can be said about it?

There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern.

I always think back to the original movies and to those quieter moments where Luke is out in A New Hope, and there are the two suns setting. It is the equivalent, basically, of a farm boy dying to get out of his small town and do something bigger. It's those kinds of universal themes that ground this whole thing in space.