Pete Seeger Quotes
Top 95 wise famous quotes and sayings by Pete Seeger
Pete Seeger Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Pete Seeger on Wise Famous Quotes.
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.
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.
Looking back, I think I tried to be too eclectic. Sometimes I'd sing thirty songs, and fifteen of them were not in English.
I believe that my choosing my present course I do no dishonor to them, or to those who may come after me.
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.
The easiest way to avoid wrong notes is to never open your mouth and sing. What a mistake that would be.
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.
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.
The truth is a rabbit in a bramble patch. All you can do is circle around and say it's somewhere in there.
My mother was a very good violinist; my father was a musicologist and spent most of his life in academia.
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.
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."
In a world of private property, if something isn't owned by somebody, it's going to be misused by somebody else.
Many Americans knew their lives and their souls were being struggled for, and they fought for it. And I felt I should carry on.
Parents are the hardest-working members of the population. But they do it for the highest wages. Kisses.
It was only through the years that I realized what an absolutely extraordinarily thoughtful person Dr. King was.
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?
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.
Throughout history the leaders of the countries have been very particular about what songs should be sung. We know the power of songs.
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.
If I had an axe on the evening at Newport when [Dylan] broke out the electric guitar, I'd have cut his cable.
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.
The world would never amount to a hill of beans if people didn't use their imaginations to think of the impossible.
Work in nightclubs was interesting. There were interesting people and places, but by and large, the commercial music experience.
I was never enthusiastic about being somebody who was supposed to be silent about being a member of something.
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.
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.
Alan [Lomax] and his father started off changing the definition of folk music from something ancient and anonymous to something very contemporary.
But I decline to say who has ever listened to them, who has written them, or other people who have sung them.
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.
My dad, the old professor, used to say, 'Never get into an argument about what's folk music and what isn't.'
If there is a world here in a hundred years, it's going to be saved by tens of millions of little things.
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.
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.
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.
When you play the 12-string guitar, you spend half your life tuning the instrument and the other half playing it out of tune.
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.
One of the things I'm most proud of about my country is the fact that we did lick McCarthyism back in the fifties.
It's a terrible thing being a patriarch. I don't even have a gray beard. But people keep calling me up for advice.
My father, Charles Seeger, got me into the Communist movement. He backed out around '38. I drifted out in the 50's.
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.
I think folk music helps reinforce your sense of history. An old song makes you think of times gone by.