Joan Baez Quotes

I would say that I'm a nonviolent soldier. In place of weapons of violence, you have to use your mind, your heart, your sense of humor, every faculty available to you...because no one has the right to take the life of another human being.

Action is the antidote to despair.

You don't get to choose how you're going to die, or when. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now.

You may not know it, but at the far end of despair, there is a white clearing where one is almost happy.

I went to jail for 11 days for disturbing the peace; I was trying to disturb the war.

I think music has the power to transform people, and in doing so, it has the power to transform situations - some large and some small.

The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one.

I've never had a humble opinion. If you've got an opinion, why be humble about it?

To sing is to love and affirm, to fly and to soar, to coast into the hearts of the people who listen to tell them that life is to live, that love is there, that nothing is a promise, but that beauty exists, and must be hunted for and found.

I have hope in people, in individuals. Because you don't know what's going to rise from the ruins.

As long as one keeps searching, the answers will come.

To sing is to praise God and the daffodils, and to praise God is to thank Him, in every note within my small range, and every color in the tones of my voice, with every look into the eyes of my audience, to thank Him. Thank you, God, for letting me be born, for giving me eyes to see the daffodils lean in the wind, all my brothers, all my sisters, for giving me ears to hear crying, legs to come running, hands to smooth damp hair, a voice to laugh with and to sing with...to sing to you and the daffodils.

Someone had to change the world. And obviously I was the one for the job.

Instead of getting hard ourselves and trying to compete, women should try and give their best qualities to men - bring them softness, teach them how to cry.

If you don't have music, you have silence. There is power in both.

Only you and I can help the sun rise each coming morning. If we don't, it may drench itself out in sorrow.

If it's natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?

If people have to put labels on me, I'd prefer the first label to be human being, the second label to be pacifist, and the third to be folk singer.

We're not really pacifists, we're nonviolent soldiers.

There's a consensus out that it's OK to kill when your government decides who to kill. If you kill inside the country you get in trouble. If you kill outside the country, right time, right season, latest enemy, you get a medal.

The point on nonviolence is to build a floor, a strong new floor, beneath which we can no longer sink.

The point of nonviolence is to build a floor, a strong new floor, beneath which we can no longer sink. A platform which stands a few feet above napalm, torture, exploitation, poison gas, A and H bombs, the works. Give man a decent place to stand.

We both know what memories can bring / They bring diamonds and rust.

Seeing you sleeping peacefully on your back among your stuffed ducks, bears and basset hounds, would remind me that no matter how good the next day might be, certain moments were gone forever because we could not go backwards in time.

Nonviolence is a flop. The only bigger flop is violence.

That's all nonviolence is - organized love.

The longer you practice nonviolence and the meditative qualities of it that you will need, the more likely you are to do something intelligent in any situation.

If you're gonna sing meaningful songs, you have to be committed to living a life that backs that up.

There is chaos. There's bloodshed. There's carnage.

It [my vocal] didn't sound like what I wanted to hear; the vibrato isn't what I liked anymore. So I got myself to an ear, nose and throat guy who does a lot of work with singers, and I was hoping there was a big wart on my vocal cords or something and they could scrape it off and I could have the voice I wanted. But he said, "No, for 71, that's your voice."

I don't think of myself as a symbol of the sixties, but I do think of myself as a symbol of following through on your beliefs.

Sometimes I get lonesome for a storm. A full blown storm where everything changes. The sky goes through four days in an hour, the trees wail, little animals skitter in the mud and everything gets dark and goes completely wild. But it is really God - playing music in his favourite cathedral in heaven - shattering stained glass - playing a gigantic organ - thundering on the keys - perfect harmony - perfect joy.

Put tattoos all up and down our thighs, do anything our parents would despise. Take uppers, downers, blues, and reds and yellows, our brains are turning into jello.

Noise is an imposition on sanity, and we live in very noisy times.

My life is a crystal teardrop. There are snowflakes falling in the teardrop and little figures trudging in slow motion.

I've been obsessed with stopping people from blowing each other's brains out since I was ten.

Sometimes I think that it is enough to say that if we don't sit down and shut up once in a while we'll lose our minds even earlier than we had expected. Noise is an imposition on sanity, and we live in very noisy times.

As long as we keep searching, the answers come.

When I was 16, the guest speaker was King. And I was completely overwhelmed because I had been studying nonviolence, talking about it, reading about it, but here it was happening, here it was people boycotting the buses and people on the streets and taking risks, which I think was the key.

It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.

The only thing that's been a worse flop than the organization of nonviolence has been the organization of violence.

I'm a badass. I really am. When you see me hanging with Snoop Doggy Dogg, I am perfectly at home and comfortable.

I have heard more than once, 'Shut up and sing!' and I get it now.

I was writing "Diamonds and Rust' and it had nothing to do with what it turned out to be. I don't remember what it is, but I think I was writing a song. It was literally interrupted by a phone call, and it just took another curve and it came out to be what it was.

Social change really cannot happen unless people are willing to take a risk, and they were. And I was so moved by that, and of course by the way that he spoke, that made a huge dent in my belief system and my spirit.

Hypothetical questions get hypothetical answers.

Somebody else does the rigor and then I listen. I have an assistant, and my manager, and other people who hunt and find and send it to me, and then I just figure out which ones I can do justice to.

All of us are survivors, but how many of us transcend survival?

God must have something to do with joy ... and with sadness.

I have been true to the principles of nonviolence, developing a stronger and stronger aversion to the ideologies of both the far right and the far left and a deeper sense of rage and sorrow over the suffering they continue to produce all over the world.