37 Quotes by Utah Phillips

The state can't give you free speech, and the state can't take it away. You're born with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Freedom is something you assume, then you wait for someone to try to take it away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free...

Every good educator knows that true teaching is to teach kids how to ask the right questions.

I have seen that our best presidents were the do-nothing presidents: Millard Fillmore, Warren G. Harding. When you have a president who does things, we are all in serious trouble. If he does anything at all, if he gets up at night to go the bathroom, somehow, mystically, trouble will ensue.

I don't need fame and I don't need power and I don't need wealth. I'm in need of friends, which I have found in abundance.

I created my own party. It's called the Sloth and Indolence Party, and I'm running as an anarchist candidate in the best sense of that word. I've studied the presidency carefully.

Oh, mercy, I think we're all storytellers, you know. You think of the excuses you told your parents for why you got home late. I just never gave it up.

The most important movement in the world is the feminist movement. If we can really figure out what's going on between men and women, the other problems will take care of themselves. I'm sure of it.

When I was in Utah there, first learning the kind of music I love, my favorite singer was T. Texas Tyler. So my friend, Norman Ritchie, the traveling teenage sage, started calling me U. Utah Phillips.

I tramped. When I was on the freight trains, I wasn't looking for work. I was looking to go from place to place without paying any money.