Pete Seeger
Just as with other great words, the word environment means different things. You might say that a cave woman twenty thousand years ago sweeping out the cave was improving the environment. Many people improving the environment think only in terms of the air they breathe in their hometown and the water in the aquifer under their hometown. My guess is very few are thinking centuries ahead or thousand of years ahead, but that's what we have to do.Collection: Mean
My dad, the old professor, used to say, 'Never get into an argument about what's folk music and what isn't.'Collection: Dad
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.Collection: Thinking
The real meaning of courage was the personal sacrifice of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King.Collection: Courage
But if two and two and fifty make a million...Collection: Two
If there is a world here in a hundred years, it's going to be saved by tens of millions of little things.Collection: Years
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.Collection: Years
I remember someone once saying, "Pete, you know you really should take voice lessons." And I said, "Well, if I could find any voice teacher that could teach me to sing like Lead Belly I'd spend every cent to study under him." But every time you'd go to a voice teacher, he'd teach you to warble, as if you'd want to be an opera singer, and that's not what I'm interested in.Collection: Teacher
I'd like to be remembered as the sower of seeds. That's the greatest parable in the bible as far as I'm concerned. Some seeds fall in the pathway, get stomped on and don't grow. Some fall on the stones and don't even sprout, but others fall on the ground and multiply a thousand fold.Collection: Fall
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.Collection: Thinking
He [Alan Lomax] started right off trying to find people who could introduce folk songs to city people. He found a young actor named Burl Ives and said, "Burl, you know a lot of great country songs learned from your grandmother, don't you know people would love to hear them?" He put on radio programs. He persuaded CBS to dedicate "The School of the Air" for one year to American folk music. He'd get some old sailor to sing an old sea shanty with a cracked voice. Then he'd get me to sing it with my banjo.Collection: Country
It's a terrible thing being a patriarch. I don't even have a gray beard. But people keep calling me up for advice.Collection: People
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.Collection: Country
I would ask, "How can one have a technological society without research? How can one have research without researching dangerous areas? How can one research dangerous areas without uncovering dangerous information? How can you uncover dangerous information without it falling into the hands of insane people who will sooner or later destroy the human race, if not the whole of life on earth?" Who knows? God only knows!Collection: Fall
My mother playing the violin and my father and grandfather playing the piano, classical stuff.Collection: Mother
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."Collection: Plato
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.Collection: Mirrors
Some folklorists just collected dead bones from one graveyard, only to bury them in another, their library.Collection: Library
Now any person who plays an acoustic guitar standing up on stage with a microphone is a folk singer. Some grandmother with a baby in her arms singing a 500-year-old song, well, she's not a folk singer, she's not on stage with a guitar and a microphone. No, she's just an old grandmother singing an old song. The term "folk singer" has gotten warped.Collection: Song
Alan [Lomax] and his father started off changing the definition of folk music from something ancient and anonymous to something very contemporary.Collection: Father
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.Collection: Determination
I learned by transcribing songs out of the Library of Congress collection in Washington where I was working. I got a job when I just turned twenty in 1939 and Alan [Lomax] needed some help. I listened to hundreds of records every week.Collection: Song
I was about 16 years old years when my father took me to a square dance festival in North Carolina. For the first time in my life, I found there was music in my country that you never heard on the radio, and you didn't hear on the juke boxes, and in theaters. I fell in love with it, especially the long-necked banjos.Collection: Country
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.Collection: War
My father, Charles Seeger, got me into the Communist movement. He backed out around '38. I drifted out in the 50's.Collection: Father
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.Collection: School
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.Collection: Song
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.Collection: Country
In a world of private property, if something isn't owned by somebody, it's going to be misused by somebody else.Collection: World
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...Collection: Song
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Art
All songwriters are links in a chain.Collection: Links
Well, it's one of the things that will. Words are good, and words help us become the leading species on earth to the point where we are now ready to wipe ourselves off the earth. But I think that all the arts are needed, and sports too, and cooking, food, and all these different ways of communication. Smiles, looking into eyes directly, all these different means of communication are needed to save this world. But certainly a great melodyCollection: Sports
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.Collection: Song
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.Collection: Giving
Plagiarism is basic to all cultureCollection: Culture
The key to the future of the world, is finding the optimistic stories and letting them be known.Collection: Stories
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.Collection: Country
Technology will save us if it doesn’t wipe us out first.Collection: Firsts
One of the things I’m most proud of about my country is the fact that we did lick McCarthyism back in the fifties.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Country
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”.Collection: Country
Songs won’t save the planet, but neither will books or speeches.Collection: Book