Top 140 Pete Seeger Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Pete Seeger

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

— Pete Seeger

104. “I never intended to make a living from music. That’s the funny thing. I wanted to be a journalist.”

— Pete Seeger

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

— Pete Seeger

106. “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

107. “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

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

— Pete Seeger

109. “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

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

— Pete Seeger

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “I feel that my whole life is a contribution.”

— Pete Seeger

115. “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

116. “Sometimes you find an old tune so good you can use it several times for different purposes.”

— Pete Seeger

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

— Pete Seeger

118. “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

119. “Honest songs aren’t written for money.”

— Pete Seeger

120. “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

121. “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

122. “It’s been my belief that learning how to do something in your hometown is the most important thing.”

— Pete Seeger

123. “Food is one of the great organizing tools.”

— Pete Seeger

124. “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

125. “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

126. “Maybe Americans have found it easier to latch on to new traditions because we are uprooted people, and have few deep roots.”

— Pete Seeger

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

— Pete Seeger

128. “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

129. “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

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

— Pete Seeger

131. “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

132. “Songs won’t save the planet, but neither will books or speeches.”

— Pete Seeger

133. “It all boils down to what I would most like to do as a musician. Put songs on people’s lips instead of just in their ears.”

— Pete Seeger

134. “Work in nightclubs was interesting. There were interesting people and places, but by and large, the commercial music experience.”

— Pete Seeger

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

— Pete Seeger

136. “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

137. “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

138. “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.”

— Pete Seeger

139. “I’d really rather put songs on people’s lips than in their ears.”

— Pete Seeger

140. “RULERS should be careful about what songs are allowed to be sung.”

— Pete Seeger

141. “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