110+ Pete Seeger Quotes On Recycling, Folk And Activism

Pete Seeger was an American folk singer, songwriter, and social activist. He was a key figure in the mid-20th century American folk music revival and was known for his support of progressive causes. Seeger wrote some of the most iconic songs of the 20th century, including "If I Had a Hammer," "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," and "Turn, Turn, Turn." Following is our collection on famous quotes by Pete Seeger on recycling, folk, activism.

Top 10 Pete Seeger Quotes

1. I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other.
2. Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. It's a very important thing to learn to talk to people you disagree with.
6. 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.
7. Little boxes made of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same.
8. 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.
9. The first step in solving a problem is admitting there is a problem to be solved.
10. I think folk music helps reinforce your sense of history. An old song makes you think of times gone by.

Pete Seeger Short Quotes

• Being generous of spirit is a wonderful way to live.
• This banjo surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.
• I feel that my whole life is a contribution.
• Plagiarism is basic to all culture
• It's been my belief that learning how to do something in your hometown is the most important thing.
• Participation - that's what's gonna save the human race.
• Singing with children in the schools has been the most rewarding experience of my life.
• I fought for peace in the fifties.
• My mother gave me a ukulele at age eight, and I sang the popular tunes of the day.
• I never intended to make a living from music. That's the funny thing. I wanted to be a journalist.

Pete Seeger Quotes About Folk

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. — Pete Seeger

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

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. — Pete Seeger

Alan [Lomax] and his father started off changing the definition of folk music from something ancient and anonymous to something very contemporary. — Pete Seeger

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. — Pete Seeger

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

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

Pete Seeger Quotes About Sung

I’ve never sung anywhere without giving the people listening to me a chance to join in - as a kid, as a lefty, as a man touring the U.S.A. and the world, as an oldster. I guess it’s kind of a religion with me. Participation. That’s what’s going to save the human race. — Pete Seeger

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. — Pete Seeger

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

I have sung for Americans of every political persuasion, and I am proud that I never refuse to sing to an audience, no matter what religion or color of their skin, or situation in life. — Pete Seeger

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. — Pete Seeger

But I decline to say who has ever listened to them, who has written them, or other people who have sung them. — Pete Seeger

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. — Pete Seeger

Again, I say I will be glad to tell what songs I have ever sung, because singing is my business. — Pete Seeger

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

I love my country very dearly, and I greatly resent the implication that some of the places that I have sung and some of the people that I have known, and some of my opinions, whether they are religious or philosophical, make me less of an American. — Pete Seeger

Pete Seeger Quotes About People

There is an old Arabic proverb, 'When the king puts the poet on his payroll, he cuts off the tongue of the poet', so throughout the ages, people in power have liked to control music, they used to throw songwriters in jail throughout history, and were assassinated. — Pete Seeger

Most conservatives just want to turn back the clock to a time before the income tax - 100 years or so. I would like to turn the clock back thousands of years to a time when people lived in small communities and took care of each other. — Pete Seeger

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. — Pete Seeger

I'm not sure if my involvement in causes, benefits, marches, and demonstrations has made a huge difference, but I know one thing: that involvement has connected me with the good people: people with the live hearts, the live eyes, the live heads. — Pete Seeger

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

Now somebody will ask me, Pete, how can you prove these songs really make a difference? And I have to confess I can't prove a darn thing, except that the people in power must think they do something, because they keep the songs off the air. — Pete Seeger

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 seem to get people to sing with me. — Pete Seeger

Work in nightclubs was interesting. There were interesting people and places, but by and large, the commercial music experience. — Pete Seeger

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. — Pete Seeger

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

Pete Seeger Quotes About Songs

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

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

I still prefer to hear [Bob] Dylan acoustic, some of his electric songs are absolutely great. Electric music is the vernacular of the second half of the twentieth century, to use my father's old term. — Pete Seeger

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

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. — Pete Seeger

Song, songs kept them going and going; They didn't realize the millions of seeds they were sowing. They were singing in marches, even singing in jail. Songs gave them the courage to believe they would not fail. — Pete Seeger

Songs are funny things. They can slip across borders. Proliferate in prisons. Penetrate hard shells. I always believed that the right song at the right moment could change history. — Pete Seeger

A good song reminds us what we're fighting for. — Pete Seeger

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

There's a story behind every old ballad or work song or nonsense song that I ever knew. Sometimes it's a fascinating story. A story of people struggling for freedom, struggling to get along in this old world. — Pete Seeger

Pete Seeger Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Pete Seeger

According to my definition of God, I'm not an atheist. Because I think God is everything. Whenever I open my eyes I'm looking at God. Whenever I'm listening to something I'm listening to God. — Pete Seeger

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. — Pete Seeger

We have more freedom of the press than any other country in a similar position. Even way back in the frightened '50s, Communists, for example, could publish their magazine. The KKK published their own books. But face it, the mass media is controlled by money. — Pete Seeger

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

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. — Pete Seeger

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. — Pete Seeger

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson corresponded for 13 years before they died on the same day. They asked, "How can one have prosperity without commerce? How can one have commerce without luxury? How can one have luxury without corruption? How can you have corruption without the end of the Republic?" And they really didn't know the answer. — Pete Seeger

A productive mistake is: (1) made in the service of mission and vision; (2) acknowledged as a mistake; (3) learned from; (4) considered valuable; (5) shared for the benefit of all. — Pete Seeger

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. — Pete Seeger

I believe that my choosing my present course I do no dishonor to them, or to those who may come after me. — Pete Seeger

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

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

Well, normally I’m against big things. I think the world is going to be saved by millions of small things. Too many things can go wrong when they get big.” — Pete Seeger (on how he felt about attending his big 90th birthday bash last year) — Pete Seeger

When I got out of school, I spent two years just hitchhiking around. Every time I met some old farmer who could play banjo, I got him to teach me a lick or two. Little by little, I put it together. — Pete Seeger

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

I was 16 when I came to New York. I had graduated to a tenor banjo in the school jazz band, and it was kind of boring - just chords, chords, chords. Then my father took me to a mountain music and dance festival in Asheville, North Carolina, and there I saw relatively uneducated people playing great music by ear. — Pete Seeger

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. — Pete Seeger

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. — Pete Seeger

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. — Pete Seeger

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

My mother playing the violin and my father and grandfather playing the piano, classical stuff. — Pete Seeger

It's a terrible thing being a patriarch. I don't even have a gray beard. But people keep calling me up for advice. — Pete Seeger

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

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. — Pete Seeger

The easiest way to avoid wrong notes is to never open your mouth and sing. What a mistake that would be. — Pete Seeger

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. — Pete Seeger

This world is so full of hypocrisy, the only way you can be honest is to be a hermit. — Pete Seeger

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

Be wary of great leaders. — Pete Seeger

RULERS should be careful about what songs are allowed to be sung. — Pete Seeger

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? — Pete Seeger

The key to the future of the world is finding the optimistic stories and letting them be known. — Pete Seeger

You have a right to your opinion and I've got a right to mine. Period. — Pete Seeger

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

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. — Pete Seeger

The world will be saved by people fighting for their homes. — Pete Seeger

The American Indians were Communists. They were. Every anthropologist will tell you they were Communists. No rich, no poor. If somebody needed something the community chipped in. — Pete Seeger

How can you save the world you have not seen if you can't save the community you have seen? — Pete Seeger

If there's a world here in a hundred years, it's going to be saved by tens of millions of little things. The powers-that-be can break up any big thing they want. They can corrupt it or co-opt it from the inside, or they can attack it from the outside. But what are they going to do about 10 million little things? They break up two of them, and three more like them spring up! — Pete Seeger

Hope that there are many, many small leaders. — Pete Seeger

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? — Pete Seeger

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. — Pete Seeger

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

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. — Pete Seeger

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. — Pete Seeger

My father, Charles Seeger, got me into the Communist movement. He backed out around '38. I drifted out in the 50's. — Pete Seeger

All songwriters are links in a chain. — Pete Seeger

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. I love my country very dearly, and I greatly resent the implication that some of the places that I have sung and some of the people that I have known, and some of my opinions, whether they are religious or philosophical, make me less of an American. — Pete Seeger

When you play the 12-string guitar,you spend half your life tuning the instrument and the other half playing it out of tune. — Pete Seeger

It was only through the years that I realized what an absolutely extraordinarily thoughtful person Dr. King was. — Pete Seeger

Every time I'm in the woods, i feel like I'm in church. — Pete Seeger

Realize that little things lead to bigger things. — Pete Seeger

I was never enthusiastic about being somebody who was supposed to be silent about being a member of something. — Pete Seeger

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. — Pete Seeger

The world will be solved by millions of small things. — Pete Seeger

Food is one of the great organizing tools. — Pete Seeger

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! — Pete Seeger

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. — Pete Seeger

I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing good that doesn't have bad consequences and nothing bad that doesn't have good consequences. — Pete Seeger

Life Lessons by Pete Seeger

1. Pete Seeger taught that music can be a powerful tool for social change and that it can be used to bring people together.
2. He also showed that one person can make a difference and that it is important to stand up for what is right.
3. Finally, he showed that it is possible to stay true to your values and principles while still engaging with the world around you.