Top 70 Joan Baez Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Action is the antidote to despair.”

— Joan Baez

2. “As long as one keeps searching, the answers will come.”

— Joan Baez

3. “If you don’t have music, you have silence. There is power in both.”

— Joan Baez

4. “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

5. “If you’re gonna sing meaningful songs, you have to be committed to living a life that backs that up.”

— Joan Baez

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

— Joan Baez

7. “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.”

— Joan Baez

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

— Joan Baez

9. “God respects me when I work. He loves me when I sing. Tagore.”

— Joan Baez

10. “Only you and I can help the sun rise each coming morning. If we don’t, it may drench itself out in sorrow.”

— Joan Baez

11. “There is chaos. There’s bloodshed. There’s carnage.”

— Joan Baez

12. “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

Featured in: Strong Quotes

13. “Hypothetical questions get hypothetical answers.”

— Joan Baez

14. “Peace might sell, but who’s buying?”

— Joan Baez

15. “Social change really cannot happen unless people are willing to take a risk, and they were. And I was so moved by that, and of course by the way that he spoke, that made a huge dent in my belief system and my spirit.”

— Joan Baez

16. “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

17. “All of us are survivors, but how many of us transcend survival?”

— Joan Baez

18. “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

19. “I was trying to disturb the war.”

— Joan Baez

20. “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

21. “I have been true to the principles of nonviolence, developing a stronger and stronger aversion to the ideologies of both the far right and the far left and a deeper sense of rage and sorrow over the suffering they continue to produce all over the world.”

— Joan Baez

22. “If you swing both ways, you really swing. I just figure you double your pleasure.”

— Joan Baez

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

— Joan Baez

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

— Joan Baez

25. “To love means you also trust.”

— Joan Baez

26. “That’s all nonviolence is – organized love.”

— Joan Baez

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

— Joan Baez

28. “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

29. “If it’s natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?”

— Joan Baez

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

— Joan Baez

31. “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

32. “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.”

— Joan Baez

33. “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

34. “My life is a crystal teardrop. There are snowflakes falling in the teardrop and little figures trudging in slow motion.”

— Joan Baez

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

— Joan Baez

36. “Sometimes I get lonesome for a storm. A fullblown storm where everything changes.”

— Joan Baez

37. “Noise is an imposition on sanity, and we live in very noisy times.”

— Joan Baez

38. “The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one.”

— Joan Baez

39. “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.”

— Joan Baez

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

— Joan Baez

41. “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

42. “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.”

— Joan Baez

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

— Joan Baez

Featured in: Strong Quotes

44. “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.”

— Joan Baez

45. “Sometimes I think that it is enough to say that if we don’t sit down and shut up once in a while we’ll lose our minds even earlier than we had expected. Noise is an imposition on sanity, and we live in very noisy times.”

— Joan Baez

46. “Living so fully, I can’t imagine what any drug could do for me.”

— Joan Baez

47. “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

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

— Joan Baez

49. “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.”

— Joan Baez

50. “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