Joan Baez Quotes

1. Tonight is planned, efficient, calculated, antiseptic, cold-blooded murder and I think everyone who is here is here to try to enlist the morality and soul of this country.


2. 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.

3. To love means you also trust.

4. (on Bob Dylan) Dylan made it pretty clear he didn't want to do all that other stuff.

5. Hypothetical questions get hypothetical answers.

6. My concern has always been for the people who are victimized, unable to speak for themselves and who need outside help.

7. 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.

8. You can even hear me go flat in places...It's all over that recording. The audience was in a dark depression. We didn't even include all of their responses, as you might imagine.

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

10. (before the concert, Baez said a movement like this was waiting to happen) It was the final tear for the overflow and you can't stop running water…Cindy's was the final tear.

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

12. All serious daring starts from within.


13. 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.

14. To sing is to love and affirm, to fly and 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.

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



16. Peace might sell, but who's buying?


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

18. Good morning, children of the 80s. This is your Woodstock, and it's long overdue.

19. 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.





20. In the first march I went to there were 10 of us. This is huge.

21. 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.

22. 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.




23. 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.

24. 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.

25. 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.

26. You know in the first march I went on against the war in Vietnam there were 10 of us.

27. 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.

28. 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.

29. 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.


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

31. 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.




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

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

34. That's all nonviolence is - organized love.


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


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

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

38. 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.




39. 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.

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


41. I spend a lot of time with Buddhists. I'm not a Buddhist, but their relationship with death interests me.

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

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

44. I think Cindy and the women have impeccable credentials - no matter how hard people try to slander and assassinate their personalities, it is impeccable credentials. I think they simply can't be not listened to.


45. Action is the antidote to despair.

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

47. I've never been an optimist.


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

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

50. I know that the Camp Casey movement is going to end the war in Iraq.

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





52. 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.

53. I was going to say thank you for inviting me but I already had my plane ticket.

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

55. I realized after the first two hours, I had been smiling the whole time...It was a motherly smile, but also appreciation for a documentary really well made. Bob revealed more than I think anyone really expected him to. I think Scorsese gets some five stars for that. He done good.

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


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