261 Quotes by Pete Seeger

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.

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.

Any damn fool can make something complex; it takes a genius to make something simple.

I tell people I was in the U.S. Army for three and a half years in WWII -- but what did I mainly do to beat the fascists? Play the banjo.

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)

[...] our technology and our economic system seem to produce the present bad situation: millions of people feel themselves poor and powerless; millions feel that music is something to be made only by experts.

It all boils down to what I would most like to do as a musician. Put songs on people's lips instead of just in their ears.

Maybe Americans have found it easier to latch on to new traditions because we are uprooted people, and have few deep roots.

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.