Utah Phillips Quotes – Utah Phillips was a labor organizer and a poet of America. He was also a folk singer and a storyteller. Utah Phillips worked a lot for laborers. He works in a labor union.
Utah Phillips described the problems and the struggles that the labor unions have to face. He also described the power of self-identifying. Many times, Utah Phillips tried to promote the struggles of workers in his work.
Phillips always worked for them. He promoted the work of the industrial workers. Utah Phillips showed them in his words and music. The words of Phillips were always for the workers of the world.
With his words, he inspired other people. Utah Phillip’s words had a strong impact on other people. We have collected some famous Utah Phillips quotes.
In This Article:
Most Popular Utah Phillips Quotes on Hard Work
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2.” The Earth is not dying-it is being killed. And the people who are killing it have names and addresses.”-Utah Phillips
3.”Kids don’t have a little brother working in the coal mine, they don’t have a little sister coughing her lungs out in the looms of the big mill towns of the Northeast. Why? Because we organized; we broke the back of the sweatshops in this country; we have child labor laws. Those were not benevolent gifts from enlightened management. They were fought for, they were bled for, they were died for by working people, by people like us. Kids ought to know that.”-Utah Phillips
4.”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.”-Utah Phillips
5.”I said, “OK, Ammon [Hennacy], I will try that.” He said, “You came into the world armed to the teeth. With an arsenal of weapons, weapons of privilege, economic privilege, sexual privilege, racial privilege. You want to be a pacifist, you’re not just going to have to give up guns, knives, clubs, hard, angry words, you are going to have lay down the weapons of privilege and go into the world completely disarmed.”-Utah Phillips
6.”The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free.”-Utah Phillips
7.”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”-Utah Phillips
8.”The most un-American thing you can do is to stifle dissent.”-Utah Phillips
9.”Every good educator knows that true teaching is to teach kids how to ask the right questions.”-Utah Phillips
10.”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?”-Utah Phillips
11.”When I went to high school – that’s about as far as I got – reading my U.S. history textbook, well, I got the history of the ruling class. I got the history of the generals and the industrialists and the presidents that didn’t get caught. How ’bout you? I got all of the history of the people who owned the wealth of the country, but none of the history of the people that created it.”-Utah Phillips
12.”I’m here to change the world, and if I am not, I am probably wasting my time.”-Utah Phillips
13.”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!”-Utah Phillips
14.”As I have said so often before, the long memory is the most radical idea in America…”-Utah Phillips
15.”My pacifism came after I joined the army and was shipped over to Korea. There was a little one-room orphanage there called Song-do. There were 180 babies in there, and they were GI babies. The U.S. government would not acknowledge this, and the Korean government had nothing to do with them. They were living on a 100-pound bag of rice a month. Some of those kids, when they were old enough, would go out and shine shoes. They would show up at the gate of our compound to shine shoes, and you’d swear they were looking for their fathers.”-Utah Phillips
16.”I guarantee, that if I am elected, I will take over the White House, hang out, shoot pool, scratch my ass, and not do a damn thing . . . Which is to say, if you want something done, don’t come to me to do it for you; you got to get together and figure out how to do it yourselves. Is that a deal?”-Utah Phillips
17.”Sing your song Dance your dance Tell your story I will Listen and remember.”-Utah Phillips
18.”They’re going to clear cut your best thoughts for the sake of profit unless you learn to resist, because the profit system follows the path of least resistance and following the path of least resistance is what makes the river crooked!”-Utah Phillips
19.”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.”-Utah Phillips
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21.”Laurie Lewis’ songs combine passion and sheer craft in a way you don’t hear very often. Whatever country music is supposed to be, she’s at the center of it.”-Utah Phillips
22.”I don’t need fame and I don’t need power and I don’t need wealth. I’m in need of friends, which I have found in abundance.”-Utah Phillips
23.”I have seen that our best presidents were the do-nothing presidents: Millard Fillmore, Warren G. Harding. When you have a president who does things, we are all in serious trouble. If he does anything at all, if he gets up at night to go the bathroom, somehow, mystically, trouble will ensue.”-Utah Phillips
24.”The most important movement in the world is the feminist movement. If we can really figure out what’s going on between men and women, the other problems will take care of themselves. I’m sure of it.”-Utah Phillips
25.” When I was in Utah there, first learning the kind of music I love, my favorite singer was T. Texas Tyler. So my friend, Norman Ritchie, the traveling teenage sage, started calling me U. Utah Phillips.”-Utah Phillips
26.” What I really learned in the army was how to be a pacifist.”-Utah Phillips
27.” Oh, mercy, I think we’re all storytellers, you know. You think of the excuses you told your parents for why you got home late. I just never gave it up.”-Utah Phillips
28.” It is better to be likable than to be talented.”-Utah Phillips
29.” It’s nice to know there are some things in early 21st-century post-industrial culture that don’t change very fast. I am one of those.” -Utah Phillips
30.” I tramped. When I was on the freight trains, I wasn’t looking for work. I was looking to go from place to place without paying any money. “-Utah Phillips
31.” When you have an engagement, at least in my world, the world that I create for myself, an engagement doesn’t begin when you hit the stage and end when you leave the stage. It begins when you hit the city limits, and it ends when you leave the city limits.”-Utah Phillips
32.” I created my own party. It’s called the Sloth and Indolence Party, and I’m running as an anarchist candidate in the best sense of that word. I’ve studied the presidency carefully.”-Utah Phillips
33.”Cause the profit system follows the path of least resistance and following the path of least resistance is what makes the river crooked. Hmmmm”-Utah Phillips
34.”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?”-Utah Phillips
35.”I have a good friend in the East, who comes to my shows and says, you sing a lot about the past, you can’t live in the past, you know. I say to him, I can go outside and pick up a rock that’s older than the oldest song you know,
and bring it back in here and drop it on your foot. Now the past didn’t go anywhere, did it? It’s right here, right now.
I always thought that anybody who told me I couldn’t live in the past was trying to get me to forget something that if I remembered it it would get them serious trouble. No, that 50s, 60s, 70s, 90s stuff, that whole idea of decade packaging, things don’t happen that way. The Vietnam War heated up in 1965 and ended in 1975– what’s that got to do with decades? No, that packaging of time is a journalist convenience that they use to trivialize and to dismiss important events and important ideas. I defy that.”-Utah Phillips
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37.“The big system can be pretty overwhelming. We know that we can’t beat them by competing with them. What we can do is build small systems where we live and work that serve our needs as we define us and not as they ‘re defined for us. The big boys in their shining armor are up there on castle walls hurling their thunderbolts. We’re the ants patiently carrying sand a grain at a time from under the castle wall. We work from the bottom up. The knights up there don’t see the ants and don’t know what we’re doing. They’ll figure it out only when the wall begins to fall. It takes time and quiet persistence. Always remember this: They fight with money and we resist with time, and they’re going to run out of money before we run out of time”-Utah Phillips
38.“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.”-Utah Phillips
39.“I didn’t know what exhausted me emotionally until that moment, and I realized that the experience of being a soldier, with unlimited license for excess, excessive violence, excessive sex, was a blueprint for self-destruction. Because then I began to wake up to the idea that manhood, as passed onto me by my father, my scoutmaster, my gym instructor, my army sergeant, that vision of manhood was a blueprint for self-destruction and a lie, and that was a burden that I was no longer able to carry. It was too difficult for me to be that hard. I said, “OK, Ammon, I will try that.” He said, “You came into the world armed to the teeth. With an arsenal of weapons, weapons of privilege, economic privilege, sexual privilege, racial privilege. You want to be a pacifist, you’re not just going to have to give up guns, knives, clubs, hard, angry words, you are going to have lay down the weapons of privilege and go into the world completely disarmed.”-Utah Phillips
40.“Yes, the long memory is the most radical idea in this country. It is the loss of that long memory which deprives our people of that connective flow of thoughts and events that clarifies our vision, not of where we’re going, but where we want to go.”-Utah Phillips
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Utah Phillips believed that many times we want to do a lot of things in life. But we do not know how to do that. For doing anything in life, it is imperative to do self-identification.
Self-identification and self-realization are the critical parts of life. When you identify yourself, then you know what you can do. Without self-identification, it becomes difficult to do hard work in life.
Once you know what you love to do in life, then nothing becomes difficult for you. When you start realizing that what is essential for you and begin working for it, success is easier.
Q: What can people do to defend their civil liberties?
Phillips: I’m a pacifist, but the most American thing you can do is to dissent, and the most un-American thing you can do is to stifle dissent. When you feel threatened by the suppression of your liberties, you exercise them to the nth degree, you scream your head off every chance you get. You talk to people you don’t agree with. Really good advice: Every day, talk to at least two people who don’t agree with you. It’s the only way it is going to get done.”-Utah Phillips
By reading the quotes of Utah Phillips, you will know about self-identification and self-realization. The quotes of Utah Phillips might inspire you in life.
The inspiration to find yourself and do self-realization. When you start knowing about yourself, then nothing stops you. What are your thoughts about these Utah Phillips quotes? Do like, share, and comment on these quotes.
