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We're not really pacifists, we're nonviolent soldiers.

Joan Baez

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Joan Baez
Age: 84
Born: 1941
Born: January 9
Activist
Composer
Dancer
Guitarist
Musician
Pacifist
Record Producer
Recording Artist
Singer
Singer-Songwriter
Staten Island
New York City
Joan Chandos Báez
Joan Báez
Joan Chandos Baez
Joan C. Baez
Nonviolent
Pacifist
Soldiers
Soldier
Really
Pacifists

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All of us are survivors, but how many of us transcend survival?
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If it's natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?
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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.
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I was writing Diamonds and Rust' and it had nothing to do with what it turned out to be. I don't remember what it is, but I think I was writing a song. It was literally interrupted by a phone call, and it just took another curve and it came out to be what it was.
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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.
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Diamonds & Rust started off as another song. Then the words started to morph. When you write a song that deep, the words come from some place else. But when the songs stop coming, it would be so contrived to try and force it. Since then I've just been doing other people's music.
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You may not know it, but at the far end of despair, there is a white clearing where one is almost happy.
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My life is a crystal teardrop. There are snowflakes falling in the teardrop and little figures trudging in slow motion.
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Somebody else does the rigor and then I listen. I have an assistant, and my manager, and other people who hunt and find and send it to me, and then I just figure out which ones I can do justice to.
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I've never had a humble opinion. If you've got an opinion, why be humble about it?
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The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one.
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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.
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I have heard more than once, 'Shut up and sing!' and I get it now.
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Action is the antidote to despair.
Joan Baez
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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
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I didn't study anything really. I didn't learn out of the books because I couldn't read music very well, so it is what they say it is - you learn from other people. And my cohorts and I would sneak around the coffee shops and hear stuff we wanted to learn, and then you ask whoever was playing it to teach you.
Joan Baez
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We both know what memories can bring / They bring diamonds and rust.
Joan Baez
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In other words, it is what I do in the world that matters. When I traveled for three months in the Mideast, the places I wanted to go back to were Turkey and the Gaza Strip. It has to do with what Gandhi said: he found God in the eyes of the poor. Those are the places which were so moving that they were just unbearable.
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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.
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As we know, forgiveness of oneself is the hardest of all the forgivenesses.
Joan Baez