Quotes from Ani DiFranco

Now let's get talking: reefer madness. Like some arrogant government can't, By any stretch of the imagination, outlaw a plant.

I don't need anyone to hold me, I can hold my own.

Birth is the epicenter of women's power

i do it for the joy it brings because i'm a joyful girl because the world owes me nothing and we owe each other the world

I've been collecting some more high-end guitars. I have an old Martin D28 from the '60s, a beautiful, classic Martin that I know I played on 'Mariachi.'

If you like it, let it be, and if you don't please do the same.

I don't care if they eat me alive, I've got better things to do then survive.

There's this brutal imperial power, that my passport says I represent. But it will never represent where my heart lives, only vaguely where it went.

I do believe that music has an intense power to connect us together, to inspire us to become ourselves.

Too much is how I love you, but too well is how I know you.

Any tool is a weapon if you hold it right.

Some people wear their heart up on their sleeve. I wear mine underneath my right pant leg, strapped to my boot.

I've been trying to learn how to not be so conflicted about things like my own anger. I've always had a place in my music for my anger as a way of compensating for not having a mechanism to express it in my everyday life. So I've been trying to be more true to myself, and that helps me to chill out a little bit. But politically, uh-uh. No.

My political mission is as acute as ever. For me, in addition to kind of looking at the world and trying to engage in my society politically, having the kid around sort of makes me check in with myself. I think you're all busy trying to fix the world, but what about yourself?

I seriously hate pop music and all things super-commercial.

We have to be able to criticise what we love, to say what we have to say 'cause if your not trying to make something better, than as far as I can tell, you are just in the way.

I mean, whatWhat if no one's watchingWhat if when we're deadWe are just deadI mean, whatWhat if it's just us down hereWhat if God is just an ideaSomeone put in your head

But in the garden of simple, where all of us are nameless, you were never anything but beautiful to me.

I did a lot of work with myself over the course of being pregnant and the first few months of being pregnant. It's nice, the pace of being pregnant; it gives you a long time to not just germinate a baby but germinate the mother that you're gonna be.

It seems that different people have an idea of what I am, and what I should be. And then there's me.

Why do you think I write these feminist songs, to try and teach myself to respect myself. You know, it's not because I'm a hero.

Some people wear their smile like a disguise. Those people who smile a lot, watch their eyes. I know 'cause I'm like that a lot. You think everything's ok, and it is . . . 'till it's not.

Smile pretty and watch your back

Patriarchy is like the elephant in the room that we don't talk about, but how could it not affect the planet radically when it's the superstructure of human society?