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.
The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one.
Someone had to change the world. And obviously I was the one for the job.
Only you and I can help the sun rise each coming morning. If we don’t, it may drench itself out in sorrow.
I went to jail for 11 days for disturbing the peace; I was trying to disturb the war.
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.
You may not know it, but at the far end of despair, there is a white clearing where one is almost happy.
If it’s natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?
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.
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.