If it’s natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?
Nonviolence is a flop. The only bigger flop is violence.
As long as one keeps searching, the answers will come.
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.
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.
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.
If you don’t have music, you have silence. There is power in both.
We’re not really pacifists, we’re nonviolent soldiers.
That’s all nonviolence is – organized love.
It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.
I have hope in people, in individuals. Because you don’t know what’s going to rise from the ruins.
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.
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.
I’ve been obsessed with stopping people from blowing each other’s brains out since I was ten.
I was trying to disturb the war.
To love means you also trust.
If you swing both ways, you really swing. I just figure you double your pleasure.
My dread is for my show to be a nostalgia act. So the key to it is how do we keep it fresh?
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.
People say I’m such a pessimist, but I always was. It never stopped me from doing what I had to do. I would say I’m a realist.