Joan Baez Quotes

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?

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

As long as we keep 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've been obsessed with stopping people from blowing each other's brains out since I was ten.

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

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

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

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.

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

Hypothetical questions get hypothetical answers.

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

I'm lucky to have met so many people who have been involved in peace and who have been peace prize winners.

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.

"Nasty Man" isn't a laughing matter, but you have to laugh anyway. The song, itself, becomes something of a laughing matter because we'd go crazy if we didn't keep laughing.

Mostly what I listen to when I turn on my little iPod is opera.

Peace might sell, but who's buying?

As we know, forgiveness of oneself is the hardest of all the forgivenesses.

We were raised with that discussion about violence and non-violence, and we all pretty much came up on the side of non-violence. That became my foundation with politics and my livelihood.

I'm not a rock and roller, a hitmaker. I'm highly dependent on what's coming out of these vocal cords.

My father was a physicist and also an activist. My first public protest was with my dad at Stanford. I came by all that honestly.

I was trying to disturb the war.

My dread is for my show to be a nostalgia act. So the key to it is how do we keep it fresh?

To love means you also trust.