Top 99 Quotes & Sayings by Joan Baez

That's all nonviolence is - organized love.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Hypothetical questions get hypothetical answers.

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.

Action is the antidote to despair.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

I've never been an optimist.

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.

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

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

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.

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

To love means you also trust.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

As long as we keep searching, the answers come.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I wasn't popular in school, I was Mexican, I was all these inappropriate things. I started playing the ukulele and taking it to school, and I realized people liked listening to it. I would play it to comfort myself at home, and I'd play rhythm and blues songs that had four chords. That's how it started.

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.

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

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

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

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

The search is in the doing.

Sometimes I get lonesome for a storm. A full blown storm where everything changes. The sky goes through four days in an hour, the trees wail, little animals skitter in the mud and everything gets dark and goes completely wild. But it is really God - playing music in his favourite cathedral in heaven - shattering stained glass - playing a gigantic organ - thundering on the keys - perfect harmony - perfect joy.

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

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

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

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.