Top 190 Quotes & Sayings by Pete Seeger - Page 2

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.

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

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

There is a big, beautiful world that could be destroyed by selfishness and foolishness. We musicians have it without power to save it. In a small way, every single one of us counts.

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.

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.

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.

The truth is a rabbit in a bramble patch. All you can do is circle around and say it's somewhere in there.

Did you ever want something really bad and then when you finally got it all you could do was stand there and grin at it?

John McCutcheon is not only one of the best musicians in the USA, but also a great singer, songwriter, and song leader. And not just incidentally, he is committed to helping hard-working people everywhere to organize and push this world in a better direction.

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.

Hope that there are many, many small leaders.

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.

I'm not sure if my involvement in causes, benefits, marches, and demonstrations has made a huge difference, but I know one thing: that involvement has connected me with the good people: people with the live hearts, the live eyes, the live heads.

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

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

The world will be solved by millions of small things.

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

Music has always had the ability to comfort and inspire.

This banjo surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.

Realize that little things lead to bigger things.

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

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

When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn?

Do-so is more important than say-so.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Food is one of the great organizing tools.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

You have a right to your opinion and I've got a right to mine. Period.

I dreamed I saw a mighty room, the room was filled with men. And the paper they were signing said they'd never fight again.

When you play the 12-string guitar,you spend half your life tuning the instrument and the other half playing it out of tune.

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

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.

To everything there is a season.

To live you have to experiment, to have the ability to experiment you have to have confidence, to have confidence you have to be loved, to be loved you have to love.

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.

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)

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.

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.

Honest songs aren`t written for money.

I love my country very dearly, and I greatly resent the implication that some of the places I have sung and some of the people that I have known, and some of my opinions, whether they are religious or philosophical, or I might be a vegetarian, make me any less of an American.

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

I always knew that sooner or later there would come somebody like Woody Guthrie who could make a great song every week. Dylan certainly had a social agenda, but he was such a good poet that most of his attempts were head and shoulders above things that I and others were trying to do. ... If I had an address, I'd send him a birthday card saying, 'keep on going.'

A song is like a picture of a bird in flight; the bird was moving before the picture was taken, and no doubt continued after.

It was Rachel Carson's famous book 'Silent Spring' that got me involved with the environment. I read it in The New Yorker, in installments. Up to then, I'd thought the main job to do is help the meek inherit the Earth. And I still, that's a job that's got to be done. But I realized if we didn't do something soon, what the meek would inherit would be a pretty poisonous place to live.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.