Lesliann Baez Quotes

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

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

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've never been an optimist. ~ Joan Baez

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

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

The search is in the doing. ~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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