Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Again, I say I will be glad to tell what songs I have ever sung, because singing is my business.
I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other.
I never intended to make a living from music. That's the funny thing. I wanted to be a journalist.
It's been my belief that learning how to do something in your hometown is the most important thing.
If you love this land of the free, bring them home, bring them home, Bring them back from overseas.
I think folk music helps reinforce your sense of history. An old song makes you think of times gone by.
The easiest way to avoid wrong notes is to never open your mouth and sing. What a mistake that would be.
Parents are the hardest-working members of the population. But they do it for the highest wages. Kisses.
My mother was a very good violinist; my father was a musicologist and spent most of his life in academia.
I believe that my choosing my present course I do no dishonor to them, or to those who may come after me.
If there is a world here in a hundred years, it's going to be saved by tens of millions of little things.
The truth is a rabbit in a bramble patch. All you can do is circle around and say it's somewhere in there.
Some folklorists just collected dead bones from one graveyard, only to bury them in another, their library.
My dad, the old professor, used to say, 'Never get into an argument about what's folk music and what isn't.'
If I had an axe on the evening at Newport when [Dylan] broke out the electric guitar, I'd have cut his cable.
But I decline to say who has ever listened to them, who has written them, or other people who have sung them.
I was never enthusiastic about being somebody who was supposed to be silent about being a member of something.
It was only through the years that I realized what an absolutely extraordinarily thoughtful person Dr. King was.
In a world of private property, if something isn't owned by somebody, it's going to be misused by somebody else.
It's a terrible thing being a patriarch. I don't even have a gray beard. But people keep calling me up for advice.
One of the things I'm most proud of about my country is the fact that we did lick McCarthyism back in the fifties.
The world would never amount to a hill of beans if people didn't use their imaginations to think of the impossible.
My father, Charles Seeger, got me into the Communist movement. He backed out around '38. I drifted out in the 50's.
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.
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 like to say I'm more conservative than Goldwater. He just wanted to turn the clock back to when there was no income tax.
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.
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.
Looking back, I think I tried to be too eclectic. Sometimes I'd sing thirty songs, and fifteen of them were not in English.
When you play the 12-string guitar,you spend half your life tuning the instrument and the other half playing it out of tune.
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.
When you play the 12-string guitar, you spend half your life tuning the instrument and the other half playing it out of tune.
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.
Many Americans knew their lives and their souls were being struggled for, and they fought for it. And I felt I should carry on.
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.
Work in nightclubs was interesting. There were interesting people and places, but by and large, the commercial music experience.
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.
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.
Throughout history the leaders of the countries have been very particular about what songs should be sung. We know the power of songs.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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 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.
You'd be surprised how many stupid mistakes I've made. I make stupid mistakes all the time, and some of them have been very big stupid mistakes.
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.
Alan [Lomax] and his father started off changing the definition of folk music from something ancient and anonymous to something very contemporary.
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.
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.