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.

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

As long as one keeps searching, the answers come.

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

Action is the antidote to despair.

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.

Only you and I can help the sun rise each coming morning.

If we don't, it may drench itself out in sorrow.

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.

You don't get to choose how you're going to die, or when.

You can decide how you're going to live now.

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 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.

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

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.

That's all nonviolence is - organized love.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

I think the question that nobody wanted to deal with is the question they're posing: did my kid die in vain? Because the answer is too awful.

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.

Hypothetical questions get hypothetical answers.

Sometimes I get lonesome for a storm. A fullblown storm where everything changes.

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.

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.

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.

All serious daring starts from within.

I was addicted to rhythm 'n' blues pretty much directly into folk music.

I had my little 45s of mostly black artists. That was as close as I got. I've never listened to heavy rock or stuff that jangles my nerves, because I'm already jangled.

Only you and I can help the sun rise each coming morning.

If we don't, it may drench itself out in sorrow. You special, miraculous, unrepeatable, fragile, fearful, tender, lost, sparkling ruby emerald jewel, rainbow splendor person. It's up to you.

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."

As long as one keeps searching, the answers come.

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

I am so disconnected from the world of rock 'n' roll.

I was always peripheral, partly because of the drug culture. I was not involved in that.

I'm not a rock and roller, a hitmaker.

I'm highly dependent on what's coming out of these vocal cords.

And my voice now is a struggle, it's a daily struggle to keep it up.

Gravity has begun to fight the vocal cords the way it does with everybody. So I have a vocal therapist, and we record the sessions and I use them on tour every day.

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.

I think I would have had an easier time of it if I had had training much earlier. Because when I got to the training, it was in my late 30s and I already probably had every bad habit a singer could have. In fact, it still goes on. It's un-training those habits and retraining new ones - the breathing, the relaxation, the tongue, the lungs, the everything.

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

I love the lower ranges of my new voice.

I really enjoy that. It's a challenge, and I accept the challenge. I sort of enjoy it now to reach notes that maybe four years ago I couldn't reach. I don't mean to grumble about it. I'm past that critical period and have gone on to a whole new field. And we go everywhere. We travel around the world, and I learn songs from every place we go, and it's a joyful process.

It sounds corny, but it's absolutely true: A song chooses me.

I don't go looking for a certain kind of lyric. It kind of develops its own little arc and I'll just see what happens.

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

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

There are good guys, and there are congressional people who are good guys, and I certainly vote in those elections. You know, my fondest dream would be if Obama, when he got out of office, decided he was going to go back and organize on the streets. He'd be the only person I could imagine who could really create a movement similar to what King did, and God knows we need that now.

If it came back I would be thrilled. I would be delighted to write more songs. I need them now because I want to make an album and I have to depend on other people's music, which I've done for years. But still, it'd be really nice to be able to sprinkle it with my own.