Pete Seeger quotes are fitting reminder to artist’s life of passionate activism for the causes he cared about including education, peace, and America

Pete Seeger: 10 Pete Seeger Quotes

1. On changing the world (from 2006 Beliefnet interview): “Words are good, and words help us become the leading species on earth to the point where we are now ready to wipe ourselves off the earth. But I think that all the arts are needed, and sports too, and cooking, food, and all these different ways of communication. Smiles, looking into eyes directly, all these different means of communication are needed to save this world. But certainly a great melody . . .”
2. On suggestion that “This Land Is Your Land” should become American national anthem (from 2006 Beliefnet interview): “I said, “Please no — can’t you see the marines marching into the next little country singing ‘This land is your land, this land is my land?’”
3. On songwriter Woody Guthrie: “He was the single biggest part of my education.”
4. On existence of God (from 2006 Beliefnet interview): “I feel most spiritual when I’m out in the woods. I feel part of nature. Or looking up at the stars. [I used to say] I was an atheist. Now I say, it’s all according to your definition of God. According to my definition of God, I’m not an atheist. Because I think God is everything. Whenever I open my eyes.”
5. On attraction to rural music (from biography, How Can I Keep From Singing by David Dunaway): “I liked the strident vocal tone of the singers, the vigorous dancing. The words of the songs had all of meat of life in them. Their humour had a bite, it was not trivial. Their tragedy was real, not sentimental.”
6. On education (from 2006 Beliefnet interview): “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. My mother was a mixture. Her grandfather came over from France and ran a preparatory school in New York. My mother was a very good violinist, my father was a musicologist and spent most of his life in academia. 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.”
7. On oft-repeated story is that he threatened to take an axe to Bob Dylan’s power cables at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival: “I was furious that the sound was so distorted, you could not understand a word he was singing . . . He was singing a great song, “Maggie’s Farm” — a great song. But you couldn’t understand it.” Seeger said he told the sound man: “Fix the sound, so you can understand him. They hollered back: ‘No, this is the way they want it.’ I don’t know who ‘they’ was. I was so mad, I said: ‘Damn, if I had an axe, I’d cut the cable right now.’ I really was that mad.”
8. On songwriting (from 2006 Beliefnet interview): “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.”
9. On his patriotism (to House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955): “I feel that in my whole life I have never done anything of any conspiratorial nature. 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. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, essentially under such compulsion as this.”
10. On music and community (from 2006 Beliefnet interview): “I’ve often thought, standing onstage with 1,000 people in front of me, that somebody over on my right had a great-great grandfather who was trying to kill the great-great grandfather of somebody off to my left. And here we are all singing together. And wouldn’t it surprise all those great-grandfathers if they could see their great-grandchildren singing together? They’d probably say, ‘Why did we fight so hard?’ Good question! 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.”