Baez Quotes

Put tattoos all up and down our thighs, do anything our parents would despise. Take uppers, downers, blues, and reds and yellows, our brains are turning into jello. ~ Joan Baez

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. ~ Joan Baez

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

I'd hear a tune in my head and the words would come. And then, very suddenly it just stopped. It seemed too stilted to try and learn how to write a song, to go to round robins and to learn things from other people on how to write a song. So I just stopped and did other things. ~ Joan Baez

When I started out playing guitar and singing, I was about twelve, going on thirteen. The role models for me back then were the folk singers. They all had these high, really nice voices and ranges, like Judy Collins and Joan Baez, and then later, of course, Joni Mitchell and Linda Ronstadt. I decided early on that I was going to learn how to write songs really, really well, because I didn't want to have to compete as a singer. I didn't feel that it was my strong point. ~ Lucinda Williams

I think the question that nobody wanted to deal with is the question they're posing: did my kid die in vain? Because the answer is too awful. ~ Joan Baez

We must sit on the rim
of the well of darkness
and fish for fallen light
with patience.
--Pablo Neruda ~ Wendy Brown-Baez

The search is in the doing. ~ Joan Baez

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. ~ Joan Baez

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. ~ Joan Baez

When I was 16, the guest speaker was King. And I was completely overwhelmed because I had been studying nonviolence, talking about it, reading about it, but here it was happening, here it was people boycotting the buses and people on the streets and taking risks, which I think was the key. ~ Joan Baez

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

I've never been an optimist. ~ Joan Baez

I think we have responsibilities to be active in the things we believe in, regardless of what our job is. At least in my lifetime, there has been a tremendous combining of activism and music, that came up in the era of Pete Seeger and the Weavers and Joan Baez and Bob Dylan and Peter Paul & Mary. ~ Bonnie Raitt

Any effect, constant, theorem or equation named after Professor X was first discovered by Professor Y , for some value of Y not equal to X. ~ John C. Baez

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. ~ Joan Baez

I was trying to disturb the war. ~ Joan Baez

It's better to work with a nice category containing some nasty objects, than a nasty category containing only nice objects. ~ John C. Baez

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

I've been obsessed with stopping people from blowing each other's brains out since I was ten. ~ Joan Baez

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. ~ Joan Baez

Back then I was still listening to rhythm and blues, and my aunt took me to see a Pete Seeger concert. And it gelled. He made all the sense in the world to me. I got addicted to his albums, and then Belafonte and Odetta - they were the people who seemed to fuse things that were important to me into music. I think Pete the most because he did what he did to the point where he took those enormous risks and then paid for them. ~ Joan Baez

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

Why speculate when you can calculate? ~ John C. Baez

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

We need to have faith in the people who are giving this movement direction to be smart enough to stay one step ahead of what's coming up next. ~ Joan Baez

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

I would say I grew up listening a lot to Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland and Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell. I grew up listening to those because my parents were kind of into folk music. ~ Melora Hardin

Commutative algebra is a lot like topology, only backwards. ~ John C. Baez

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

We enjoyed the fact that we were called to the folk festivals and we got to know Joan Baez, Dylan. We were singing strictly gospel, but then after we started hearing songs that they would sing, we saw that those songs were very fitting for us because they were singing the truth, and truth is gospel. ~ Mavis Staples

Some people don't even notice. "Oh, you sound exactly like you did!" And I say, "OK, if that's what you want to believe, that's fine." ~ Joan Baez

That was sheer luck that it [being immersed into folk scene] happened when my voice began to develop. I don't know exactly what would have happened if I hadn't been alive and well and really lively in the Cambridge scene. But (the folk scene) was, and I fell into it absolutely naturally in the little coffee shops, and pretty soon it was Newport and then it was an overwhelming response internationally, actually. ~ Joan Baez

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

We both know what memories can bring / They bring diamonds and rust. ~ Joan Baez

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

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

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 ... ~ Joan Baez

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 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. ~ 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. ~ Joan Baez

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. ~ Joan Baez

Now I know I understand that it was Sgt. Pepper's Band, that put the sixties into song, where have all the heroes gone? ~ Joan Baez

God must have something to do with joy ... and with sadness. ~ Joan Baez

And my voice now is a struggle, it's a daily struggle to keep it up. Gravity has begun to fight the vocal cords the way it does with everybody. So I have a vocal therapist, and we record the sessions and I use them on tour every day. ~ Joan Baez

Oy vey, these guys is New York's spineless
Strangled and denied it for Anthony Baez ~ Himanshu Suri

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. ~ Joan Baez

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

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. ~ Joan Baez

As long as we keep searching, the answers come. ~ Joan Baez

..the following parable may be useful. Long ago, when shepherds wanted to see if two herds of sheep were isomorphic, they would look for an explicit isomorphism. In other words, they would line up both herds and try to match each sheep in one herd with a sheep in the other. But one day, along came a shepherd who invented decategorification. She realized one could take each herd and 'count' it, setting up an isomorphism between it and some set of 'numbers', which were nonsense words like 'one, two, three, . . . ' specially designed for this purpose. By comparing the resulting numbers, she could show that two herds were isomorphic without explicitly establishing an isomorphism! In short, by decategorifying the category of finite sets, the set of natural numbers was invented. According to this parable, decategorification started out as a stroke of mathematical genius. Only later did it become a matter of dumb habit, which we are now struggling to overcome by means of categorification. ~ John Baez

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

Seeing you sleeping peacefully on your back among your stuffed ducks, bears and basset hounds, would remind me that no matter how good the next day might be, certain moments were gone forever because we could not go backwards in time. ~ Joan Baez

It [my vocal] didn't sound like what I wanted to hear; the vibrato isn't what I liked anymore. So I got myself to an ear, nose and throat guy who does a lot of work with singers, and I was hoping there was a big wart on my vocal cords or something and they could scrape it off and I could have the voice I wanted. But he said, "No, for 71, that's your voice." ~ Joan Baez

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. ~ Joan Baez

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. ~ Joan Baez

She was the right girl at the right time. She had only a small repertory of Child ballads, never trained her pure soprano and annoyed some purists because she was indifferent to the origins of her material and sang everything 'sad'. ~ Joan Didion

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. ~ Joan Baez

As soon as I graduated from high school I was off to the biggest college my parents could afford, Colorado University at Boulder, having seen students there who looked a lot like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. ~ Susan Schneider

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