The most American thing you can do is to stifle dissent.
The state can’t give you freedom, 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...
But they lived those extraordinary lives that can never be lived again. And in the living of them, they gave me a history that is more profound, more beautiful, more powerful, more passionate, and ultimately more useful, than the best damn history book I ever read.
Sing your song. Dance your dance. Tell your story. I will listen and remember.
The Earth is not dying-it is being killed. And the people who are killing it have names and addresses.
I’m here to change the world, and if I am not, I am probably wasting my time.
The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free.
But if it’s true that the only true life I had was the life of my brain, what sense does it make to hand that brain to somebody for eight hours a day for their particular use on the presumption that, at the end of the day, they will give it back in an unmutilated condition? Fat chance!
Children, be worried when they call you America’s most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what they’ve done to the other natural resources?
Cause the profit system follows the path of least resistance and following the path of least resistance is what makes the river crooked. Hmmmm.
Every good educator knows that true teaching is to teach kids how to ask the right questions.
Folk music isn’t owned by anybody. It is owned by everybody, like the national parks, the postal system, and the school system. It’s our common property. There is nobody’s name on it. Nobody can make money on it. It’s not copywritten.
Chris Chandler is the best performance poet I have ever seen.
Time is an enormous, long river, and I’m standing in it, just as you’re standing in it. My elders are the tributaries, and everything they thought and every struggle they went through and everything they gave their lives to, and every song they created, and every poem that they laid down flows down to me – and if I take the time to ask, and if I take the time to see, and if I take the time to reach out, I can build that bridge between my world and theirs. I can reach down into that river and take out what I need to get through this world.