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.
To sing is to love and affirm, to fly and soar, to coast into the hearts of the people who listen, to tell them that life is to live, that love is there, that nothing is a promise, but that beauty exists, and must be hunted for and found.
The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one.
Action is the antidote to despair.
The easiest kind of relationship for me is with 10,000 people. The hardest is with one.
You don't get to choose how you're going to die. Or when. You can only decide how you're going to live.
If it's natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?
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.
I've never had a humble opinion. If you've got an opinion, why be humble about it?
I spend a lot of time with Buddhists. I'm not a Buddhist, but their relationship with death interests me.
You may not know it, but at the far end of despair, there is a white clearing where one is almost happy.
The only thing that's been a worse flop than the organization of non-violence has been the organization of violence.
Nonviolence is a flop. The only bigger flop is violence.
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.
As we know, forgiveness of oneself is the hardest of all the forgivenesses.
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.
Hypothetical questions get hypothetical answers.
Mostly what I listen to when I turn on my little iPod is opera.
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.
