Quotes from Joan Baez

Hypothetical questions get hypothetical answers.

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

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.

You don't get to choose how you're going to die, or when. You can 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?

Action is the antidote to despair.

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.

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

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

Peace might sell, but who's buying?

Maybe that afternoon was the closest I ever felt to Bob: his eyes were as old as God, and he was fragile as a winter leaf.

I was born gifted. I can speak of my gifts with little or no modesty, but with tremendous gratitude, precisely because they are gifts, and not things which I created, or actions about which I might be proud.

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.

God respects me when I work. He loves me when I sing. Tagore

I asked him what made us different, and he said it was simple, that I thought I could change things, and he knew that no one could.

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

I first saw Bob Dylan in 1961 at Gerde's Folk City in Greenwich Village. He was not overly impressive. He looked like an urban hillbilly, with hair short around the ears and curly on top.

and you know the first thing Dylan did when they started talking about how much money he could make? He went over in a corner by himself, and started scribbling down a list of who his friends were, because if he was gonna be rich, he'd have to know.

because of my deep-seated opinion that war itself is a crime; that the killing of one child, the burning of one village, the dropping of one bomb sinks us into such depths of depravity that there's no use bickering over the particulars.

You don't get to choose how you're going to die or when. But you can decide how you're going to live now

He was rarely tender, and seldom reached out to anticipate another's needs, though occasionally he would exhibit a sudden concern for another outlaw, hitchhiker, or bum, and go out of his way to see them looked after. He was touching and infinitely fragile. His indescribably white hands moved constantly: putting a cigarette almost to his mouth, then tugging relentlessly at a tuft of hair at his neck, inadvertently dumping the cigarette ashes in dusty cavalcades down his jacket.

His humor was dry, private, and splendid. Sometimes he would start to chuckle. A little at a time, his lips would move from a genuine smile to a pucker. Then, instantly, he would tighten them back in, until a tiny convulsion of laughter would bring them back to the smile, and sometimes, a full grin followed by laughter.