Joan Baez

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.

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

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

That's all nonviolence is - organized love.

To sing is to love and affirm, _x000D_ to fly and to soar, _x000D_ to coast into the hearts of the people _x000D_ who listen _x000D_ to tell them that life is to live, _x000D_ that love is there, _x000D_ that nothing is a promise, _x000D_ but that beauty exists, _x000D_ and must be hunted for and found.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

As long as we keep searching, the answers come.

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

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

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.

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

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