The world is like a seesaw out of balance: on one side is a box of big rocks, tilting it its way. On the other side is a box, and a bunch of us with teaspoons, adding a little sand at a time. One day, all of our teaspoons will add up, and the whole thing will tip, and people will say, ‘How did it happen so fast?

— Pete Seeger

Pete Seeger Quotes

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.

— Pete Seeger

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

— Pete Seeger

I believe that all technological societies tend to self-destruct. The reason is that the very things that make us a successful technological society, such as our curiosity, our ambition and determination, will also cause us to fall.

— Pete Seeger

I don’t think of God as an old white man with no belly button, nor even an old black woman with no belly button. But I agree that God is something eternal. Something cannot come out of nothing. I believe God is Everything. And I believe in infinity.

— Pete Seeger

Looking back, I think I tried to be too eclectic. Sometimes I’d sing thirty songs, and fifteen of them were not in English.

— Pete Seeger

Some folklorists just collected dead bones from one graveyard, only to bury them in another, their library.

— Pete Seeger

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.

— Pete Seeger

Like most teachers, I’m just another sower of seeds.

— Pete Seeger

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.

— Pete Seeger

Work in nightclubs was interesting. There were interesting people and places, but by and large, the commercial music experience.

— Pete Seeger

Alan Lomax is the person who I think should be given major credit for what has been called the “Folk Song Revival.” My father participated with him because my father was a musicologist and urged trained musicians to learn about “the vernacular.”

— Pete Seeger

I never intended to make a living from music. That’s the funny thing. I wanted to be a journalist.

— Pete Seeger

I was never enthusiastic about being somebody who was supposed to be silent about being a member of something.

— Pete Seeger

It was only through the years that I realized what an absolutely extraordinarily thoughtful person Dr. King was.

— Pete Seeger

The first step in solving a problem is admitting there is a problem to be solved.

— Pete Seeger

Problem-Solving Firsts

It’s been my belief that learning how to do something in your hometown is the most important thing.

— Pete Seeger

Keep your sense of humor. There is a 50-50 chance the world can be saved. You- yes you- might be the grain of sand that tips the scales the right way.

— Pete Seeger

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

— Pete Seeger

The world is like a seesaw out of balance: on one side is a box of big rocks, tilting it its way. On the other side is a box, and a bunch of us with teaspoons, adding a little sand at a time. One day, all of our teaspoons will add up, and the whole thing will tip, and people will say, ‘How did it happen so fast?

— Pete Seeger

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.

— Pete Seeger

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