My dad, the old professor, used to say, 'Never get into an argument about what's folk music and what isn't.'

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

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.

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.

It's a very important thing to learn to talk to people you disagree with.

I tell kids, don't trust the media. The media with their emphasis on fame is helping to destroy this country, helping destroy the human race. It's the plug-in drug.

Shh. Listen to the sounds that surround you. Notice the pitches, the volume, the timbre, the many lines of counterpoint. As light taught Monet to paint, the earth may be teaching you music.

Songs are funny things. They can slip across borders. Proliferate in prisons. Penetrate hard shells. I always believed that the right song at the right moment could change history.

This world is so full of hypocrisy, the only way you can be honest is to be a hermit.

Long live teachers of children, because they can show children how they can save the world.

If it can’t be reduced, reused, repaired, rebuilt, refurbished, refinished, resold, recycled or composted, then it should be restricted, redesigned or removed from production.

When the leader grows, the organization grows.

One editor during the Civil War got a grievous message to meet his brothers corpse, only to find out that the telegraph operator had garbled the message to meet his living brother's CORPS.

The closer we are to God, the richer we are

The energy of mindfulness has the element of friendship and loving kindness in it.

A worried man could borrow a lot of trouble with practically no collateral.

We need to teach empathy as we do literacy.

It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

May Heaven to this Union continue its beneficence

Don't go to work to make money; go to work to spread joy.

I recorded that because it happened to me. I wasn't making a point.