Pete Seeger Quotes

But if two and two and fifty make a million...

All songwriters are links in a chain.

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.

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.

A good song can only do good, and I am proud of the songs I have sung. I hope to be able to continue singing these songs for all who want to listen, Republicans, Democrats, and independents.

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.

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

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

I fought for peace in the fifties.

The real meaning of courage was the personal sacrifice of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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."

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.

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