Pete Seeger Quotes

I'm a big fan of community, and I think independence is over-rated.

I don't like technology and all that. I'm a farm boy. I would rather live in that time when you had to provide for your family. I don't know. I'm a country kid, so I don't like modern technology.

I took it upon myself to paint a better picture of rural life and what it is all about.

Natural life, lived naturally as it is lived in the countryside, has none of that progress which is the base of happiness. Men and women in rural communities can be compared to a spring that rises out of a rock and spreads in irregular ever-widening circles. But the general principle is static.

I grew up in a small town in Sudan. There weren't many cars, so we did things in the countryside near where we lived.

If you calculate every single thing you could possibly need in your life, you would need no more than 200 people to keep all that afloat: a doctor, food, wine, cheese-eating friends, the person who makes paper, the shoemaker.

Community is not something you have, like pizza. Now is it something you can buy. It's a living organism based on a web of interdependencies- which is to say, a local economy. It expresses itself physically as connectedness, as buildings actively relating to each other, and to whatever public space exists, be it the street, or the courthouse or the village green.

We do not achieve happiness or salvation in isolation from each other but as members of society

Return to the villages means a definite, voluntary recognition of the duty of bread labour and all its connotes.

The Roman rule was, to teach a boy nothing that he could not learn standing. The old English rule was, "All summer in the field, and all winter in the study." And it seems as if a man should learn to plant, or to fish, or to hunt, that he might secure his subsistence at all events, and not be painful to his friends and fellow men.

What we do as a community, as a society, for each other, matters as much as what we do for ourselves. It sounds a little trite, but there's a powerful amount of truth in that, I think.

We don't accomplish anything in this world alone.

The fundamental law of human beings is interdependence. A person is a person through other persons.

When I was growing up, I never heard anyone pray, "Give me this day my daily bread." It was always, "Give us this day our daily bread." That stuck. We're all in this together.

You're not on your own. You're doing things with other people. This is very important for me.

Life is a big collaboration. And we can't navigate it alone.

The idea that you're supposed to do everything on your own is absurd. You can't.

The fact is, we need help, and we need each other.

Men fear that becoming 'we' will erase his 'I.' For women, our 'we' is our saving grace Women's relationships are like a renewable source of power.

At the heart of my politics has always been the value of community, the belief that we are not merely individuals struggling in isolation from each other, but members of a community who depend on each other, who benefit from each other's help, who owe obligations to each other. From that everything stems: solidarity, social justice, equality, freedom.

Community is as endangered by surplus as it is by deficit. If there is too much money floating around it enables people to have no need of each other.

Nobody in the world is completely dependent on another person, but we are all interdependent.

We're into an age of excessive individuals, all right. We're into the age were independence, autonomy, convenience, sometimes selfishness. The new trinity of me, myself and I, seems to dominate. We know that's contrary to the very nature of the human person. The very nature of the human person needs God and needs other people.

Self sufficiency appears to be a worthy goal, but it's now impossible if you want to actually get anything done. All our productivity, leverage and insight comes from being part of a community, not apart from it. The goal, I think, is to figure out how to become more dependent, not less.

We are members of one great body. Nature planted in us a mutual love, and fitted us for a social life. We must consider that we were born for the good of the whole.