Joan Baez Quotes

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.

Action is the antidote to despair.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

To sing is to praise God and the daffodils, and to praise God is to thank Him, in every note within my small range, and every color in the tones of my voice, with every look into the eyes of my audience, to thank Him. Thank you, God, for letting me be born, for giving me eyes to see the daffodils lean in the wind, all my brothers, all my sisters, for giving me ears to hear crying, legs to come running, hands to smooth damp hair, a voice to laugh with and to sing with...to sing to you and the daffodils.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

To love means you also trust.

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

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

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.

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