Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Pete Seeger, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Pete Seeger quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 157 Pete Seeger quotes for you to read and share.
There is a big, beautiful world that could be destroyed by selfishness and foolishness. We musicians have it within our power to help save it. In a small way, every single one of us counts. -- Pete Seeger
Long live teachers of children, because they can show children how they can save the world. -- Pete Seeger
How can you save the world you have not seen if you can't save the community you have seen? -- Pete Seeger
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. -- Pete Seeger
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. -- Pete Seeger
If you love this land of the free, bring them home, bring them home, Bring them back from overseas. -- Pete Seeger
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
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
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
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
We all go to different churches or no churches, we have different favorite foods, different ways of making love, different ways of doing all sorts of things, but there we're all singing together. Gives you hope. -- Pete Seeger
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
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. -- Pete Seeger
Parents are the hardest-working members of the population. But they do it for the highest wages. Kisses. -- Pete Seeger
My dad, the old professor, used to say, 'Never get into an argument about what's folk music and what isn't.' -- Pete Seeger
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. -- Pete Seeger
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
I fought for peace in the fifties. -- Pete Seeger
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
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. -- Pete Seeger
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
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, and I do this voluntarily. -- Pete Seeger
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
The key to the future of the world, is finding the optimistic stories and letting them be known. -- Pete Seeger
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
I think the world is going to be saved by millions of small things. -- Pete Seeger
Anybody who wants to learn everything is pretty stupid. You learn what you can. -- Pete Seeger
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
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. -- Pete Seeger
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
Again, I say I will be glad to tell what songs I have ever sung, because singing is my business. -- Pete Seeger
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. -- Pete Seeger
The world would never amount to a hill of beans if people didn't use their imaginations to think of the impossible. -- Pete Seeger
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
I never intended to make a living from music. That's the funny thing. I wanted to be a journalist. -- Pete Seeger
Plagiarism is basic to all culture -- Pete Seeger
Education is what you get when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get if you don't. -- Pete Seeger
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. -- Pete Seeger
The world will be saved by people fighting for their homes. -- Pete Seeger
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 get people to sing with me. -- Pete Seeger
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. -- Pete Seeger
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
Singing with children in the schools has been the most rewarding experience of my life. -- Pete Seeger
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
Like most teachers, I'm just another sower of seeds. -- Pete Seeger
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. -- Pete Seeger
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. -- Pete Seeger
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. -- Pete Seeger
My mother playing the violin and my father and grandfather playing the piano, classical stuff. -- Pete Seeger
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. -- Pete Seeger
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
I think folk music helps reinforce your sense of history. An old song makes you think of times gone by. -- Pete Seeger
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
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. -- Pete Seeger
Alan [Lomax] and his father started off changing the definition of folk music from something ancient and anonymous to something very contemporary. -- Pete Seeger
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
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
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
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
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. -- Pete Seeger
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
Any darn fool can make something complex; it takes a genius to make something simple. -- Pete Seeger
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
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
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
When you play the 12-string guitar, you spend half your life tuning the instrument and the other half playing it out of tune. -- Pete Seeger
It's a very important thing to learn to talk to people you disagree with. -- Pete Seeger
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? -- Pete Seeger
Technology will save us if it doesn't wipe us out first. -- Pete Seeger
This banjo surrounds hate and forces it to surrender. -- Pete Seeger
Work in nightclubs was interesting. There were interesting people and places, but by and large, the commercial music experience. -- Pete Seeger
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. -- Pete Seeger
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
If I had an axe on the evening at Newport when [Dylan] broke out the electric guitar, I'd have cut his cable. -- Pete Seeger
Any idiot can be complicated. It takes a genius to be simple. -- Pete Seeger
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. -- Pete Seeger
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
My mother gave me a ukulele at age eight, and I sang the popular tunes of the day. -- Pete Seeger
Get people to sing together and they'll act together too. -- Pete Seeger
When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn? -- Pete Seeger
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
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. -- Pete Seeger
Sometimes you find an old tune so good you can use it several times for different purposes. -- Pete Seeger
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. -- Pete Seeger
RULERS should be careful about what songs are allowed to be sung. -- Pete Seeger
I was never enthusiastic about being somebody who was supposed to be silent about being a member of something. -- Pete Seeger
I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other. -- Pete Seeger
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
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
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. -- Pete Seeger
If there is a world here in a hundred years, it's going to be saved by tens of millions of little things. -- Pete Seeger
One of the things I'm most proud of about my country is the fact that we did lick McCarthyism back in the fifties. -- Pete Seeger
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. -- Pete Seeger
But if two and two and fifty make a million, ... -- Pete Seeger
Food is one of the great organizing tools. -- Pete Seeger
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. -- Pete Seeger
It's been my belief that learning how to do something in your hometown is the most important thing. -- Pete Seeger
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. -- Pete Seeger
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. -- Pete Seeger
In a world of private property, if something isn't owned by somebody, it's going to be misused by somebody else. -- Pete Seeger
This world is so full of hypocrisy, the only way you can be honest is to be a hermit. -- Pete Seeger
You can't work on everything all the time, so start where you are. -- Pete Seeger
The truth is a rabbit in a bramble patch. All you can do is circle around and say it's somewhere in there. -- Pete Seeger
Historically, I believe I was correct in refusing to answer their questions. -- Pete Seeger
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
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
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. -- Pete Seeger
Some folklorists just collected dead bones from one graveyard, only to bury them in another, their library. -- Pete Seeger
My mother was a very good violinist; my father was a musicologist and spent most of his life in academia. -- Pete Seeger
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
The real meaning of courage was the personal sacrifice of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. -- Pete Seeger
Music has always had the ability to comfort and inspire. -- Pete Seeger
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. -- Pete Seeger
I believe that my choosing my present course I do no dishonor to them, or to those who may come after me. -- Pete Seeger
My father, Charles Seeger, got me into the Communist movement. He backed out around '38. I drifted out in the 50's. -- Pete Seeger
I'd really rather put songs on people's lips than in their ears. -- Pete Seeger
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
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
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. -- Pete Seeger
Not everybody has to sing the melody. -- Pete Seeger
Most scientists know what needs to be done to save our Earth. But the politicians don't listen to them. They will listen to popular pressure; the people got to supply that. -- Pete Seeger
A good song reminds us what we're fighting for. -- Pete Seeger
Many Americans knew their lives and their souls were being struggled for, and they fought for it. And I felt I should carry on. -- Pete Seeger
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
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
Songs won't save the planet, but neither will books or speeches. -- Pete Seeger
Hope that there are many, many small leaders. -- Pete Seeger
The world will be solved by millions of small things. -- Pete Seeger
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
Throughout history the leaders of the countries have been very particular about what songs should be sung. We know the power of songs. -- Pete Seeger
It was only through the years that I realized what an absolutely extraordinarily thoughtful person Dr. King was. -- Pete Seeger
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. -- Pete Seeger
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. -- Pete Seeger
Being generous of spirit is a wonderful way to live. -- Pete Seeger
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. -- Pete Seeger
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. -- Pete Seeger
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
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
To everything there is a season. -- Pete Seeger
Every time I'm in the woods, i feel like I'm in church -- Pete Seeger
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. -- Pete Seeger
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
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
Do-so is more important than say-so. -- Pete Seeger
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
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
The first country conquered by any dictator is his own country. -- Pete Seeger
All songwriters are links in a chain. -- Pete Seeger
I feel that my whole life is a contribution. -- Pete Seeger
But I decline to say who has ever listened to them, who has written them, or other people who have sung them. -- Pete Seeger
You have a right to your opinion and I've got a right to mine. Period. -- Pete Seeger
Participation - that's what's gonna save the human race. -- Pete Seeger
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
The easiest way to avoid wrong notes is to never open your mouth and sing. What a mistake that would be. -- Pete Seeger
Realize that little things lead to bigger things. -- Pete Seeger
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. -- Pete Seeger
Be wary of great leaders. -- Pete Seeger