Top 140 Pete Seeger Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The first step in solving a problem is admitting there is a problem to be solved.”

— Pete Seeger

Featured in: Problem-Solving Quotes, Firsts Quotes

2. “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

3. “To everything there is a season.”

— Pete Seeger

4. “When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn?”

— Pete Seeger

5. “It’s a very important thing to learn to talk to people you disagree with.”

— Pete Seeger

6. “Participation – that’s what’s gonna save the human race.”

— Pete Seeger

7. “If there’s something wrong, speak up!”

— Pete Seeger

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

— Pete Seeger

9. “Being generous of spirit is a wonderful way to live.”

— Pete Seeger

10. “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

11. “Plagiarism is basic to all culture.”

— Pete Seeger

12. “The easiest way to avoid wrong notes is to never open your mouth and sing. What a mistake that would be.”

— Pete Seeger

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

— Pete Seeger

14. “Music has always had the ability to comfort and inspire.”

— Pete Seeger

15. “The key to the future of the world, is finding the optimistic stories and letting them be known.”

— Pete Seeger

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

16. “Every time I’m in the woods, i feel like I’m in church.”

— Pete Seeger

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

— Pete Seeger

18. “Get people to sing together and they’ll act together too.”

— Pete Seeger

19. “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

20. “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

Featured in: Country Quotes

21. “But if two and two and fifty make a million,...”

— Pete Seeger

22. “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

23. “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

24. “This world is so full of hypocrisy, the only way you can be honest is to be a hermit.”

— Pete Seeger

25. “A good song reminds us what we’re fighting for.”

— Pete Seeger

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

32. “Hope that there are many, many small leaders.”

— Pete Seeger

33. “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.”

— Pete Seeger

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

— Pete Seeger

35. “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

36. “Realize that little things lead to bigger things.”

— Pete Seeger

37. “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

38. “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

Featured in: Country Quotes

39. “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

40. “This banjo surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.”

— Pete Seeger

41. “How can you save the world you have not seen if you can’t save the community you have seen?”

— Pete Seeger

42. “If you love this land of the free, bring them home, bring them home, Bring them back from overseas.”

— Pete Seeger

43. “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

44. “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

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

— Pete Seeger

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

— Pete Seeger

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

— Pete Seeger

48. “All songwriters are links in a chain.”

— Pete Seeger

49. “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

50. “Be wary of great leaders.”

— Pete Seeger