Top 70 Joan Baez Quotes
#1. 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.
Joan Baez
#2. 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.
Joan Baez
#3. Mostly what I listen to when I turn on my little iPod is opera.
Joan Baez
#4. Action is the antidote to despair.
Joan Baez
#5. I have hope in people, in individuals. Because you don't know what's going to rise from the ruins.
Joan Baez
#6. 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.
Joan Baez
#8. I'm lucky to have met so many people who have been involved in peace and who have been peace prize winners.
Joan Baez
#9. You may not know it, but at the far end of despair, there is a white clearing where one is almost happy.
Joan Baez
#10. I was trying to disturb the war.
Joan Baez
#11. That's all nonviolence is - organized love.
Joan Baez
#12. 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.
Joan Baez
#13. 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.
Joan Baez
#14. Someone had to change the world. And obviously I was the one for the job.
Joan Baez
#15. As long as we keep searching, the answers come.
Joan Baez
#16. 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.
Joan Baez
#17. The only thing that's been a worse flop than the organization of nonviolence has been the organization of violence.
Joan Baez
#18. As we know, forgiveness of oneself is the hardest of all the forgivenesses.
Joan Baez
#19. 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.
Joan Baez
#20. I've never had a humble opinion. If you've got an opinion, why be humble about it?
Joan Baez
#21. Now I know I understand that it was Sgt. Pepper's Band, that put the sixties into song, where have all the heroes gone?
Joan Baez
#22. If it's natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?
Joan Baez
#23. Some people don't even notice. "Oh, you sound exactly like you did!" And I say, "OK, if that's what you want to believe, that's fine."
Joan Baez
#24. 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.
Joan Baez
#25. I've been obsessed with stopping people from blowing each other's brains out since I was ten.
Joan Baez
#27. There is chaos. There's bloodshed. There's carnage.
Joan Baez
#28. 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.
Joan Baez
#29. 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.
Joan Baez
#30. Peace might sell, but who's buying?
Joan Baez
#31. 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.
Joan Baez
#32. 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.
Joan Baez
#33. We both know what memories can bring / They bring diamonds and rust.
Joan Baez
#34. All of us are survivors, but how many of us transcend survival?
Joan Baez
#35. 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.
Joan Baez
#36. Living so fully, I can't imagine what any drug could do for me.
Joan Baez
#37. My dread is for my show to be a nostalgia act. So the key to it is how do we keep it fresh?
Joan Baez
#38. 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.
Joan Baez
#39. I spend a lot of time with Buddhists. I'm not a Buddhist, but their relationship with death interests me.
Joan Baez
#40. 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.
Joan Baez
#41. If you swing both ways, you really swing. I just figure you double your pleasure.
Joan Baez
#42. The point on nonviolence is to build a floor, a strong new floor, beneath which we can no longer sink.
Joan Baez
#43. 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.
Joan Baez
#44. The foundation of my beliefs is the same as it was when I was 10. Non-violence.
Joan Baez
#45. 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.
Joan Baez
#46. We're not really pacifists, we're nonviolent soldiers.
Joan Baez
#47. 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.
Joan Baez
#48. I didn't go through the routine of singing in small clubs and doing open mics and working so hard the way a lot of people do and did. It was just an overnight kind of thing.
Joan Baez
#49. If you don't have music, you have silence. There is power in both.
Joan Baez
#50. As long as one keeps searching, the answers will come.
Joan Baez
#51. 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.
Joan Baez
#52. I see a young man playing 'Plaisir d'Amour' on guitar. I knew I didn't want to go to college; I was already playing a ukulele, and after I saw that, I was hooked. All I wanted to do was play guitar and sing.
Joan Baez
#53. 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.
Joan Baez
#55. The hardest song to write is a protest song, a topical song with meaning.
Joan Baez
#56. I went to jail for 11 days for disturbing the peace; I was trying to disturb the war.
Joan Baez
#57. Nonviolence is a flop. The only bigger flop is violence.
Joan Baez
#58. 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.
Joan Baez
#59. 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.
Joan Baez
#60. 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.
Joan Baez
#61. Noise is an imposition on sanity, and we live in very noisy times.
Joan Baez
#62. 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.
Joan Baez
#63. 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.
Joan Baez
#64. People say I'm such a pessimist, but I always was. It never stopped me from doing what I had to do. I would say I'm a realist.
Joan Baez
#65. If you're gonna sing meaningful songs, you have to be committed to living a life that backs that up.
Joan Baez
#66. 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.
Joan Baez
#67. The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one.
Joan Baez
#68. 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.
Joan Baez
#69. God must have something to do with joy ... and with sadness.
Joan Baez
#70. 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.
Joan Baez
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