Joan Baez

“You may not know it, but at the far end of despair, there is a white clearing where one is almost happy.”

“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.”

“I'm lucky to have met so many people who have been involved in peace and who have been peace prize winners.”

“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.”

“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 hardest song to write is a protest song, a topical song with meaning.”

“My dread is for my show to be a nostalgia act. So the key to it is how do we keep it fresh?”

“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.”

“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.”

“Someone had to change the world. And obviously I was the one for the job.”

“As we know, forgiveness of oneself is the hardest of all the forgivenesses.”

“I have hope in people, in individuals. Because you don't know what's going to rise from the ruins.”

“Nonviolence is a flop. The only bigger flop is violence.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Mostly what I listen to when I turn on my little iPod is opera.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Hypothetical questions get hypothetical answers.”