Pete Seeger Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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.

I keep reminding people that an editorial in rhyme is not a song. A good song makes you laugh, it makes you cry, it makes you think.

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

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.

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

I'm still a communist in the sense that I don't believe the world will survive with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer - I think that the pressures will get so tremendous that the social contract will just come apart.

I've found that festivals are a relatively painless way to meet people and make a few points that need making, without having to hit them over the head with too many speeches.

I live in the country, so I get a fair amount of exercise. We heat our house with wood, so I split wood. We also live on a steep hill, and I have to rake and put in cross-stitches to keep the road from washing out when there's a big rain.

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.

Being generous of spirit is a wonderful way to live.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

I came along and was a teenager in the Depression, and nobody had jobs. So I went out hitchhiking, when I met a man named Woody Guthrie. He was the single biggest part of my education.

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.

I feel that my whole life is a contribution.

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.

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.

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.

I am saying voluntarily that I have sung for almost every religious group in the country, from Jewish and Catholic, and Presbyterian and Holy Rollers and Revival Churches.

I try to sing many different kinds of songs. If I sing a batch of humorous songs, I'll throw in a deadly serious song. Or if I'm singing too many serious songs, I'll throw in a ridiculous song, to mix it up.

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

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.

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

My mother was a very good violinist; my father was a musicologist and spent most of his life in academia.

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.

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

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.

But I decline to say who has ever listened to them, who has written them, or other people who have sung them.

Some of my ancestors were religious dissenters who came to America over three hundred years ago. Others were abolitionists in New England in the eighteen forties and fifties.

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

John Hammond persuaded Columbia to put it out as a single, and it was the only one I ever had that sold more than 20,000.

Malvina was one of the great people of the 20th century,

Songs wont save the planet, but neither will books or speeches. Songs are sneaky things; they can slip across borders.

Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't

It was not going to be a graceful symbol of the past. It was going to try to restore the river.

I know many beautiful songs from your home county, Carbon, and Monroe, and I hitchhiked through there and stayed in the homes of miners.

In a few lines of poetry he captured one of the great contradictions of the world: the heroism of people doing something, even knowing it was a crazy something. And he showed how the establishment has used music for thousands of years to support its way of thinking.

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

I'd like to be remembered as the sower of seeds. That's the greatest parable in the bible as far as I'm concerned. Some seeds fall in the pathway, get stomped on and don't grow. Some fall on the stones and don't even sprout, but others fall on the ground and multiply a thousand fold.

I used to agree with Kurt Vonnegut, who said that the human race has a snowball's chance in hell of being around a hundred years from now.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The first country conquered by any dictator is his own country.

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

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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."

Music has always had the ability to comfort and inspire.

Little boxes made of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same.

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.

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

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.

Plagiarism is basic to all culture

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

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.

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.

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

And the people in the houses All went to the University And they got put in boxes Little boxes all the same, Little boxes all the same, Little boxes all the same, Little boxes all the same And they all come out all the same.

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.

It's a terrible thing being a patriarch. I don't even have a gray beard. But people keep calling me up for advice.

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

Be wary of great leaders.

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.

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.

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.

In a world of private property, if something isn't owned by somebody, it's going to be misused by somebody else.

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.

Like most teachers, I'm just another sower of seeds.

Get people to sing together and they'll act together too.

Not everybody has to sing the melody.

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

Edison failed ten thousand times before he perfected the modern electric lamp. The average man would have quit at the first failure. That's why there are so many average men and only one Edison.

However, the agricultural revolution took thousands of years, the Industrial Revolution took hundreds, and the information revolution only took decades. So, who knows what's going to happen in the next few decades, especially with the women's revolution.

All songwriters are links in a chain.

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

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.

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

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.