Quotes from Pete Seeger

When you're facing an opponent over a broad front, you don't aim for the opponent's strong points, important though they may be. Pick a little outpost that you can capture and win. And then you find another place that you can capture and win it, and then you move slowly toward the big places.

Get people to sing together and they'll act together too.

The good and bad are all tangled up together. American popular music is loved around the world because of its African rhythm. But that wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for slavery.

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.

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.

The truth is a rabbit in a bramble patch. All you can do is circle around and say it's somewhere in there.

If you love this land of the free, bring them home, bring them home, Bring them back from overseas.

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.

I'm still a communist in the sense that I don't believe the world will survive with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer - I think that the pressures will get so tremendous that the social contract will just come apart.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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 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.

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.

Songs won't save the planet, but neither will books or speeches.

My dad, the old professor, used to say, 'Never get into an argument about what's folk music and what isn't.'

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.

You can't work on everything all the time, so start where you are.

My mother was a very good violinist; my father was a musicologist and spent most of his life in academia.

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.

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

If it can't be reduced, reused, repaired, rebuilt, refurbished, refinished, resold, recycled or composted, then it should be restricted, redesigned or removed from production.