Joan Baez Quotes

We need to have faith in the people who are giving this movement direction to be smart enough to stay one step ahead of what's coming up next.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The white music was melodic and pretty, and you had beautiful women's voices like Gogi Grant and even the Andrews Sisters. Then I went directly to rhythm and blues, which had beautiful voices but not much melody in particular and pretty much the same chord pattern. I loved it, I was entrenched in it, but then folk music came in the middle of that for me, and made its own path. And it was part of the rebellion against bubblegum music, or music that is pretty but doesn't say anything.

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

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 hardest song to write is a protest song, a topical song with meaning.

I'd hear a tune in my head and the words would come. And then, very suddenly it just stopped. It seemed too stilted to try and learn how to write a song, to go to round robins and to learn things from other people on how to write a song. So I just stopped and did other things.

That's all nonviolence is - organized love.

I wish it was clear for me how it happened [stop writing songs], then maybe I could start writing again. But it's kind of an "it." It just submerged itself. Because the way I had always written was just that it came out. It just happened.

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

There's very little I can sing now. When I asked my first voice teacher, who was the best one, "When will I know when to stop singing?" he said, "Your voice will tell you." And it is very, very difficult to sing now.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

The foundation of my beliefs is the same as it was when I was 10. Non-violence.

During the 'ballad' years for me, the politics was latent; I was just falling in love with the ballads and my boyfriend. And there was the beauty of the songs.

In this society, we don't like to face the future and the dying process and all of it. Most of us really don't want to think about it, but it's facing me in the mirror every day.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Living so fully, I can't imagine what any drug could do for me.

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.

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

I didn't study anything really. I didn't learn out of the books because I couldn't read music very well, so it is what they say it is - you learn from other people. And my cohorts and I would sneak around the coffee shops and hear stuff we wanted to learn, and then you ask whoever was playing it to teach you.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Hypothetical questions get hypothetical answers.