Woody Guthrie Quotes

I'm gonna tell all you fascists, you may be surprised
People all over this world are getting organized
You're bound to lose
You fascists are bound to lose Race hatred cannot stop us, this one thing I know
Poll tax and Jim Crow and greed have got to go
You're bound to lose
You fascists are bound to lose ... People of every color marching side by side
Marching across these fields where a million fascists died
You're bound to lose
You fascists are bound to lose ... I'm going into this battle, take my union gun
Gonna end this world of slavery before this war is won
You're bound to lose
You fascists are bound to lose

Life has got a habit of not standing hitched. You got to ride it like you find it. You got to change with it. If a day goes by that don't change some of your old notions for new ones, that is just about like trying to milk a dead cow.

I have hoped as many hopes and dreamed so many dreams, seen them swept aside by weather, and blown away by men, washed away in my own mistakes, that — I use to wonder if it wouldn't be better just to haul off and quit hoping. Just protect my own inner brain, my own mind and heart, by drawing it up into a hard knot, and not having any more hopes or dreams at all. Pull in my feelings, and call back all of my sentiments — and not let any earthly event move me in either direction, either cause me to hate, to fear, to love, to care, to take sides, to argue the matter at all — and, yet … there are certain good times, and pleasures that I never can forget, no matter how much I want to, because the pleasures, and the displeasures, the good times and the bad, are really all there is to me. And these pleasures that you cannot ever forget are the yeast that always starts working in your mind again, and it gets in your thoughts again, and in your eyes again, and then, all at once, no matter what has happened to you, you are building a brand new world again, based and built on the mistakes, the wreck, the hard luck and trouble of the old one.

Ever'body might be just one big soul, Well it looks that a-way to me. Everywhere that you look, in the day or night, That's where I'm a-gonna be, Ma, That's where I'm a-gonna be. Wherever little children are hungry and cry, Wherever people ain't free. Wherever men are fightin' for their rights, That's where I'm a-gonna be, Ma. That's where I'm a-gonna be.

Left wing, right wing, chicken wing.

No matter how bad the wicked world has hurt you, in the long run, there is something gained, and it is all for the best … The note of hope is the only note that can help us or save us from falling to the bottom of the heap of evolution, because, largely, about all a human being is, anyway, is just a hoping machine, a working machine, and any song that says, the pleasures I have seen in all of my trouble, are the things I never can get — don't worry — the human race will sing this way as long as there is a human to race. The human race is a pretty old place.

Okemah was one of the singiest, square dancingest, drinkingest, yellingest, preachingest, walkingest, talkingest, laughingest, cryingest, shootingest, fist fightingest, bleedingest, gamblingest, gun, club and razor carryingest of our ranch towns and farm towns, because it blossomed out into one of our first Oil Boom Towns.

You will never find peace with these fascists
You'll never find friends such as we
So remember that valley of Jarama
And the people that'll set that valley free.
From this valley they say we are going
Do not hasten to bid us adieu
Even though we lost the battle at Jarama
We'll set this valley before we're through.
All this world is like this valley called Jarama
So green and so bright and so fair
No fascists can dwell in our valley
Nor breathe in our new freedoms air.

I ain't a Communist necessarily, but I have been in the red all my life.

Chorine My Sheba Queen”

Chorine! Chorine! Chorine!
Your eyes are like my sky
Wherever you go I want you to know
Its there my love will fly!

I miss my sweet Chorine
Most everywhere I go,
And I tell you now cause I want you to know
She’s the best I ever saw

Chorine your form’s divine,
Chorine your heart so true;
If you are lookin’ for a heart of gold,
Chorine will do, do, do.

My lovely sweet Chorine,
I love you best of all;
In early spring when Lovebirds sing
Or in the dreary fall!

Chorine! Chorine! Chorine!
Has anybody seen Chorine
She took off running like a new machine
Chorine my Sheba Queen

Woody Guthrie, as performed by Jim James, Jay Farrar, Will Johnson & Anders Parker, New Multitudes (2012)_

As I go walking this ribbon of highway I see above me the endless skyway And all around me the wind keeps saying: This land is made for you and me.

Yes, I’d give my life to lay my head tonight
On a bed of California stars

Any fool can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple.

I'm down here looking at the Potomac River; they say George Washington threw a silver dollar across it once. It looks a little bit too far for me to do that trick, but maybe he could. After all, a dollar went further in those days.

Let me be known as just the man that told you something you already knew.