Top 140 Pete Seeger Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “Technology will save us if it doesn’t wipe us out first.”

— Pete Seeger

54. “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

55. “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

56. “Parents are the hardest-working members of the population. But they do it for the highest wages. Kisses.”

— Pete Seeger

57. “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

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

— Pete Seeger

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

64. “The world is like a seesaw out of balance: on one side is a box of big rocks, tilting it its way. On the other side is a box, and a bunch of us with teaspoons, adding a little sand at a time. One day, all of our teaspoons will add up, and the whole thing will tip, and people will say, ‘How did it happen so fast?”

— Pete Seeger

65. “My dad, the old professor, used to say, ‘Never get into an argument about what’s folk music and what isn’t.’”

— Pete Seeger

66. “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

67. “Do-so is more important than say-so.”

— Pete Seeger

68. “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

69. “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.”

— Pete Seeger

70. “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

71. “Not everybody has to sing the melody.”

— Pete Seeger

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

— Pete Seeger

73. “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

74. “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

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

— Pete Seeger

76. “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

77. “I fought for peace in the fifties.”

— Pete Seeger

78. “The first country conquered by any dictator is his own country.”

— Pete Seeger

79. “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

80. “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

81. “I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing good that doesn’t have bad consequences and nothing bad that doesn’t have good consequences.”

— Pete Seeger

82. “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

83. “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

84. “Keep your sense of humor. There is a 50-50 chance the world can be saved. You- yes you- might be the grain of sand that tips the scales the right way.”

— Pete Seeger

85. “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

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

— Pete Seeger

87. “You have a right to your opinion and I’ve got a right to mine. Period.”

— Pete Seeger

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

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

— Pete Seeger

93. “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

94. “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

95. “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

96. “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

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

— Pete Seeger

98. “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

99. “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

100. “You can’t work on everything all the time, so start where you are.”

— Pete Seeger