Pete Seeger Quotes
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If there's something wrong, speak up!
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Hope that there are many, many small leaders.
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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.
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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.
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My father urged Alan [Lomax] not to repeat the mistakes of the European folklorists who, a century ago, had collected these peasant songs and then arranged them for part choir and accompanied them on piano, and then told the young people of their country, "Don't change a note, this is our sacred heritage." Father said, whether it's a fiddle tune or a gospel song, learn it right off the record from the people who grew up with it. Don't just learn it from a piece of paper.
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There is a big, beautiful world that could be destroyed by selfishness and foolishness. We musicians have it without power to save it. In a small way, every single one of us counts.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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My dad, the old professor, used to say, 'Never get into an argument about what's folk music and what isn't.'
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And there's a wonderful parable in the New Testament: The sower scatters seeds. Some seeds fall in the pathway and get stamped on, and they don't grow. Some fall on the rocks, and they don't grow. But some seeds fall on fallow ground, and they grow and multiply a thousandfold. Who knows where some good little thing that you've done may bring results years later that you never dreamed of?
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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.
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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.
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Participation - that's what's gonna save the human race.
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Plagiarism is basic to all culture
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And when one person taps out a beat, while another leads into the melody, or when three people discover a harmony they never knew existed, or a crowd joins in on a chorus as though to raise the ceiling a few feet higher, then they also know there is hope for the world.
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I never intended to make a living from music. That's the funny thing. I wanted to be a journalist.
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Little boxes made of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same.
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Many Americans knew their lives and their souls were being struggled for, and they fought for it. And I felt I should carry on.
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The first step in solving a problem is admitting there is a problem to be solved.
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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.
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I was never enthusiastic about being somebody who was supposed to be silent about being a member of something.
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A good song reminds us what we're fighting for.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The world will be saved by people fighting for their homes.
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