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.

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.

I feel that my whole life is a contribution.

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

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.

I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other.

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.

I know many beautiful songs from your home county, Carbon, and Monroe, and I hitchhiked through there and stayed in the homes of miners.

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.

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.

Singing with children in the schools has been the most rewarding experience of my life.

Throughout history, the leaders of countries have been very particular of what songs should be sung. We know the power of songs.

It was not going to be a graceful symbol of the past. It was going to try to restore the river.

Songs won ‘ t save the planet, but neither will books or speeches. Songs are sneaky things; they can slip across borders.

Malvina was one of the great people of the 20th century,

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.

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.

In a few lines of poetry he captured one of the great contradictions of the world: the heroism of people doing something, even knowing it was a crazy something. And he showed how the establishment has used music for thousands of years to support its way of thinking.

Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don’t.

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.

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.

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

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

Songs wont save the planet, but neither will books or speeches. Songs are sneaky things; they can slip across borders.

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

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.

I fought for peace in the fifties.

Historically, I believe I was correct in refusing to answer their questions.

John Hammond persuaded Columbia to put it out as a single, and it was the only one I ever had that sold more than 20,000.

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)

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.

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.

Little boxes made of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same