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
I spend a lot of time with Buddhists. I'm not a Buddhist, but their relationship with death interests me.
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 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.
Mostly what I listen to when I turn on my little iPod is opera.
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.
Nonviolence is a flop. The only bigger flop is violence.
The only thing that's been a worse flop than the organization of non-violence has been the organization of violence.
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.
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.
I'm lucky to have met so many people who have been involved in peace and who have been peace prize winners.
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 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've never been an optimist.
I have hope in people, in individuals. Because you don't know what's going to rise from the ruins.
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.
Hypothetical questions get hypothetical answers.
The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one.
That's all nonviolence is - organized love.
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.
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.
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.
The hardest song to write is a protest song, a topical song with meaning.
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 foundation of my beliefs is the same as it was when I was 10. Non-violence.
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.
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?
Action is the antidote to despair.
As we know, forgiveness of oneself is the hardest of all the forgivenesses.
