Bragg Quotes & Sayings

Science is experimental, moving forward step-by-step, making trial and learning through success and failure. Is not this also the way of religion, and especially of the Christian religion? The writings of those who preach the religion have from the very beginning insisted that it is to be proved by experience. If a man is drawn towards honour and courage and endurance, justice, mercy, and charity, let him follow the way of Christ and find out for himself. No findings in science hinder him in that way. — William Henry Bragg

The present rate of progress [in X-ray crystallography] is determined, not so much by the lack of problems to investigate or the limited power of X-ray analysis, as by the restricted number of investigators who have had a training in the technique of the new science, and by the time it naturally takes for its scientific and technical importance to become widely appreciated. — William Lawrence Bragg

I write late into the night at the Tutweiler in downtown Birmingham, and try hard to turn down that second cheeseburger at Milo's over by UAB, which has the best one in the whole wide world. — Rick Bragg

[Presently, science undergraduates] do not learn to write clearly and briefly, marshalling their points in due and aesthetically satisfying order, and eliminating inessentials. They are inept at those turns of phrase or happy analogy which throw a flying bridge across a chasm of misunderstanding and make contact between mind and mind. — William Lawrence Bragg

When you're a sportswriter, you learn how to use your imagination and to flex your literary muscle, because it's the same game played over and over again. There's nothing unique or marvelous. It's not an earthquake, or a weird mass murder. It's just the same old game played over and over, and you have to bring out the personalities. You have to drag them kicking and screaming out into the light of day, or you're not a good sportswriter. — Rick Bragg

A nation with their freezers full are dancing in their seats, while outside another nation is sleeping in the streets. — Billy Bragg

Broadly speaking, the discovery of X-rays has increased the keenness of our vision ten thousand times, and we can now 'see' the individual atoms and molecules. — William Henry Bragg

All the great political music was made at the height of political confrontations. — Billy Bragg

Being spokesman for a generation is the worst job I ever had. — Billy Bragg

Sound is a movement which is handed on from atom to atom in a gas through which the sound is passing, just as a chain of workers pass buckets of water to a fire. The quicker the workers move their hands and arms, the quicker the water moves. — William Henry Bragg

The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.
- Sir William Henry Bragg — William Henry Bragg

I'm still batting away on my politics for the Labour Party. I'm much further to the left of them than I used to be, but that's because they've moved, not me. — Billy Bragg

More people now work in the arts than the steel, coal and car industries combined. — Melvyn Bragg

In water so fine, a few minutes of bad memory all but disappear downstream, washed away by ten thousand belly busters, a million cannonballs. Paradise was never heaven-high when I was a boy but waist-deep, an oasis of cutoff blue jeans and raggedy Converse sneakers, sweating bottles of Nehi Grape and Orange Crush, and this stream. I remember the antidote of icy water against my blistered skin, and the taste of mushy tomato and mayonnaise sandwiches, unwrapped from twice-used aluminum foil. I saw my first water moccasin here, and my first real girl, and being a child of the foot washers I have sometimes wondered if this was my Eden, and my serpent. If it was, I didn't hold out any longer than that first poor fool did. — Rick Bragg

But, in the end, even a song that's as politically bland as Blowin in the Wind, you probably wouldn't get up and sing that now, whereas some of Bob Dylan's love songs that were contemporary with that, like say Girl from the North Country, you can still get up an play now. — Billy Bragg

The Haitians, who knew something about suffering and survival, had a beautiful phrase ... The Translation is not perfect, but the nut of it was: 'The season of pain is never over until the sky begins to cry. — Rick Bragg

In 1945 J.A. Ratcliffe ... suggested that I [join his group at Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge] to start an investigation of the radio emission from the Sun, which had recently been discovered accidentally with radar equipment ... [B]oth Ratcliffe and Sir Lawrence Bragg, then Cavendish Professor, gave enormous support and encouragement to me. Bragg's own work on X-ray crystallography involved techniques very similar to those we were developing for "aperture synthesis", and he always showed a delighted interest in the way our work progressed. — Martin Ryle

I made some friends for life, the way I usually make them. Any jackass can be pleasant company, but if people help you when you're at your worst, that's a friend. — Rick Bragg

For maybe the first time in my life, I had tried to do the safe thing, and it had blown up in my face. Never, ever again. — Rick Bragg

I was in a little punk band and we put out a few punk records that weren't very political, at all. — Billy Bragg

Everyone went and had some turkey and cornbread dressing, and hot biscuits, and mashed potatoes running with butter, and when they prayed, they thanked God for the good fortune that had found their boy, who had sense enough to know that if you're going to be hit by a train, you have to go stand on the tracks in Memphis, Tennessee. Amen. — Rick Bragg

On every pack leaned an M16, except Lori's. Her son was playing soldier with it in the bleachers. There was no clip in it, which was a good thing. — Rick Bragg

An isolationist America is no bloody use to anyone. — Billy Bragg

A patriot is someone who cares what happens in their country. — Billy Bragg

A virtue never tested is no virtue at all.

- Must I Paint You a Picture — Billy Bragg

Religious faith to W. H. Bragg was the willingness to stake his all on the hypothesis that Christ was right, and test it by a lifetime's experiment in charity. — Guglielmo Marconi

I'm trying to make a case for those people who don't have a sense of belonging that they should have, that there is something really worthwhile in having a sense of belonging, and recasting and looking at our modern history. — Billy Bragg

We read our own political content into The Clash, and they accepted it. — Billy Bragg

There are quite a few honest songwriters out there writing about relationships and their own personality traits. But for some reason, once they step out of the bedroom, their honesty doesn't seem to come with them. — Billy Bragg

Stripes on their backs. The twentieth century — Rick Bragg

Me?" said Bragg. "I'm not alive. Revived, from time to time - maybe. but not alive."
Liar."
Try me."
You forget, Mister Bragg - Stu honey - Stuart darling - Bragg baby. I already have."
They had almost reached their destination.
Col said: "I don't have burn marks for nothing, my dear. I don't have these scars by chance. I'm covered with your fingerprints. Covered from head to toe and back again on the other side."
You sound just like Minna," said Bragg.
I know," Col said. "I know I do. I've been practising. — Timothy Findley

The most important thing for anyone, I think, is to be engaged, whether you're an artist or a journalist is to be engaged in the process at some level. — Billy Bragg

It is a common condition of being poor ... you are always afraid that the good things in your life are temporary, that someone can take them away, because you have no power beyond your own brute strength to stop them. — Rick Bragg

The best writers who have put pen to paper have often had a journalism background. — Rick Bragg

Mixing pop and politics he asks me what the use is / I offer him embarrassment and my usual excuses. — Billy Bragg

Start your own revolution, cut out the middleman In a perfect world we'd all sing in tune But this is reality so give me some room So join the struggle while you may The Revolution is just a t-shirt away — Billy Bragg

But if she was going to live in a damn jungle, she preferred it be a damn jungle in Georgia, she always said, and never saw any reason to elaborate on that. — Rick Bragg

Our neighbors shake their heads And take their valuables inside While my countrymen piss in the fountains To express their national pride. — Billy Bragg

I went to Ft Bragg and learned that Delta was indeed gearing up for the rescue. Still I was concerned the Reagan staff would not be willing to take the risk of sending an official military force into Laos. — Bo Gritz

West Virginia is among the nation's leaders in military service, in killed in action, in medals for valor. — Rick Bragg

Let us think of Nature as a builder, making all that we see out of atoms of a limited number of kinds, just as the builder of a house constructs it out of so many different kinds of things: bricks, slates, planks, panes of glass, and so on. — William Henry Bragg

When I was on the road with Billy Bragg, it was cool because I was doing the whole thing solo and travel a lot by myself, which I quite like. I mean, I love being with friends, but it's kind of nice having that alone time. — Courtney Barnett

The whole subject of the X rays is opening out wonderfully, Bragg has of course got in ahead of us, and so the credit all belongs to him, but that does not make it less interesting. We find that an X ray bulb with a platinum target gives out a sharp line spectrum of five wavelengths which the crystal separates out as if it were a diffraction grating. In this way one can get pure monochromatic X rays. Tomorrow we search for the spectra of other elements. There is here a whole new branch of spectroscopy, which is sure to tell one much about the nature of an atom. — Henry Moseley

My theory is this; I'm not a political songwriter. I'm an honest songwriter. — Billy Bragg

I never met a politician who didn't want to be a guitar player in a rock band. I've got the opportunity to say what I believe in. — Billy Bragg

If one piddles correctly, time just goes away, without regret on the part of the piddler, or even any particular notice. — Rick Bragg

But I hope I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books, by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue, such perishable things for ideas have lasted thousands of years ... I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them, hope that I spend my last days on this Earth arranging and rearranging them on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany, because I just like to look at their covers, and dream of the promise of the great stories inside. — Rick Bragg

The dividing line between the wave or particle nature of matter and radiation is the moment "Now." As this moment steadily advances through time it coagulates a wavy future into a particle past. — William Lawrence Bragg

Don't worry about what people think, because once it's all over the people who love you will make you what they want you to be, and the people who don't love you will, too. — Rick Bragg

That taught me one lesson which is that you're naive to believe that bands can change the world. Bands are very naive to think that just if their audience thinks that they can change the world, that they can. That was quite a lesson for my career, really. — Billy Bragg

You can be active with the activists or sleep in with the sleepers while you're waiting for the Great Leap Forwards. — Billy Bragg

I felt lonely then. This is the time when you need somebody. This is the time when it is good to have a wife, and children, to absorb your grief, to hold on to you. This is when you pay, and pay and pay, for pretending that you don't need anybody. — Rick Bragg

Were it not for the Clash, punk would have been just a sneer, a safety pin and a pair of bondage trousers. — Billy Bragg

It is easy to be liked when the world has no jagged edges, when life is electric blankets and peach ice cream. But to be beloved, a man needs a dragon. — Rick Bragg

[Professor Bragg asserts that] In sodium chloride there appear to be no molecules represented by NaCl. The equality in number of sodium and chlorine atoms is arrived at by a chess-board pattern of these atoms; it is a result of geometry and not of a pairing-off of the atoms. — Henry Edward Armstrong

Passion is something you really don't miss, after it has cooled. It is like looking at an empty bottle on the side of the road and thinking, "Boy, I wish I had a Coke." The loves you miss are the ones that go away when they are still warm, even hot, to the touch. — Rick Bragg

Most of the people that I went to school with - I went to secondary school - we were educated to go and work in the line at Ford's, and if we were lucky, technical skilled labor. I sort of rejected that, and thought I wanted to do something else. — Billy Bragg

We are good at stories. We hoard them, like an old woman in a room full of boxes, but now and then we pull out our best, and spread them out. We talk of the bad years when the cotton didn't open, and the day my cousin Wanda was washed in the Blood. We buff our beloved ancestors until they are smooth of sin, and give our scoundrels a hard shake, although sometimes we can't remember exactly which is who. — Rick Bragg

[A]s long as you're comfortable it feels like freedom. — Billy Bragg

War what is it good for? It's good for business. — Billy Bragg

After a year's research, one realizes that it could have been done in a week. — William Henry Bragg

The Internet took off in English and although there are now fifteen hundred languages on the Internet, seventy percent of it is still in English. — Melvyn Bragg

I enjoyed so much working with the guys from Wilco, and riffing off of them, and having someone come up to me with ideas, because normally in the studio it's me who has to come up with all the ideas. — Billy Bragg

There's something I want to say in this space, but it's an emptiness where there's usually a hug. - Colin Morton to Mary Lee Bragg, 1972 — David Eso

In that sense, I became politicized because the people in the coal mining villages who were involved in the struggle knew why they were there. But they couldn't understand why some pop star from London would want to be there. — Billy Bragg

He spent two decades wandering the wilderness, overmedicated, set upon by the tax man, divorce lawyers, everything but a rain of toads. There were more fights and pills and liquor and car crashes and women and discharge of firearms - accidental and on purpose - than a mortal man could be expected to survive, but he played. — Rick Bragg

He crashed a dozen Cadillacs in one year and played the Apollo. With racial hatred burning in the headlines, the audience danced in the seats to a white boy from the bottomland, backed by pickers who talked like Ernest Tubb. "James Brown kissed me on my cheek," he says. "Top that. — Rick Bragg

To hear the Treorchy Male Choir in full throat is one of the great joys of choral music. — Melvyn Bragg

Occasionally now I feel a wang that goes in my head - once you've got it you've got it. The [illness] was quite severe, leaving me deeply unhappy and frightened. — Melvyn Bragg

...Alas, Babylon was to be among the first to give a public voice to the fears and anxieties associated with a nuclear attack and with threats of atomic radiation. And unlike others in the genre, he offered unmitigated hope. Randy Bragg and company not only survive the devastation that leaves vast Contaminated Zones throughout the United States, but they also apply the best in themselves to begin the re-establishment of life within a civil society. All of the atomic fears of the 1950s (and later) are there, but Frank's 'message' seems to be that we can survive even the worst catastrophe with everyday, secularized applications of faith, hope, and charity. — Hal Hager

The worst way to release bad news is to bury it in the financial statement footnotes, in the hope that no one will see it. A diligent investor or analyst always reads the footnotes, and will not appreciate having to dig so deep to uncover potentially critical information. — Steven M. Bragg

Only low men, the lowest, tormented the weaker things in their control. — Rick Bragg

The chemist, whose science is immediately concerned with the combinations of atoms, has rarely found it necessary to discuss their shapes, and gives them no particular forms in his diagrams. That does not mean that the shapes are unimportant, but rather that the older methods could not define them. — William Henry Bragg

History is too often the refuge of the tidy-minded, making neat patterns when the dust has settled. — Melvyn Bragg

And Sandy Martindale ... dated Elvis before the rhinestone jumpsuits and the drugs, when he was sharp and cool and jagged, like porcelain that has been hurled against a wall ... — Rick Bragg

The children start school now in August. They say it has to do with air-conditioning, but I know sadism when I see it. — Rick Bragg

I began reading Harper Lee's novel in the skimpy shade of a pine outside my grandmother's house, fat beagles pressing against me, begging for attention, ignored. At dark, I kept reading, first on the couch, a bologna sandwich in one hand, then in my bed, by the light of a 60-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling on an orange drop cord. When my mother came in from her job as a maid and unplugged my chandelier, I replayed the story in my head until it was crowded out by dreams. I woke the next morning, smelling biscuits, and reached for the book again. — Rick Bragg

I first met the subject of X-ray diffraction of crystals in the pages of the book W. H. Bragg wrote for school children in 1925, 'Concerning the Nature of Things.' — Dorothy Hodgkin

Writing novels is a way of living alternative lives. — Melvyn Bragg

The temptation to take the precious things we have apart to see how they work must be resisted for they never fit together again. — Billy Bragg

I think she [Rosalind Franklin] was a good experimentalist but certainly not of the first rank. She was simply not in the same class as Eigen or Bragg or Pauling, nor was she as good as Dorothy Hodgkin. She did not even select DNA to study. It was given to her. Her theoretical crystallography was very average. — Francis Crick

If no one seems to understand
Start your own revolution and cut out the middleman — Billy Bragg

It is one thing to be sure of yourself. It is another to have someone tell you to quit dancing, look them in the eye, and tell them the truth even if it hurts your pride. — Rick Bragg

I don't know anything about wars. I don't think even the most erudite scholars do. I think you have to fight one, to know it. — Rick Bragg

There are these boutique writers out there who think if they are not writing their novels sitting at a bistro with their laptops, then they're not real writers. That's ridiculous. — Rick Bragg

There's nothing the British like better than a bloke who comes from nowhere, makes it, and then gets clobbered. — Melvyn Bragg

Like most men, Jimmy Jim was neither all good nor all bad. It is just that when he was bad, gentler people saw in him a disturbing fury. People, a lot them, don't understand fury. They understand anger and even hatred, but fury is one of those old words that have gone out of style. Jimmy Jim Bundrum understood it. It rode his shoulder like a parrot. — Rick Bragg

Baptists burn more slowly. — Billy Bragg

You do not hate the time you waste; it evokes a much more passive emotion than that. You only wish you had it back, like a quarter in an unlucky slot machine. — Rick Bragg

In a gas, motion has the upper hand; the atoms are moving so fast that they have no time to enter into any sort of combination with each other: occasionally, atom must meet atom and, so to speak, each hold out vain hands to the other, but the pace is too great and, in a moment, they are far away from each other again. — William Henry Bragg

But this attitude could not persist. Under the supervision of "oldtimers" like Joseph Johnston, Robert E. Lee, Braxton Bragg, and Thomas Jackson, complaisant officers were gradually weeded out and West Point ideas of discipline were adopted in the Southern armies. Before the campaigns of 1862 Johnny Reb was for the most part a changed man. He had shed most of his surplus equipment, and, of much greater importance, he had abandoned the idea that military life was "all fun and frolic." In short, the volunteer had become a soldier. — Bell Irvin Wiley

If you thought the army was here protecting people like yourself, I've some news for you, we're here to defend wealth. — Billy Bragg

Even with politics, stuff comes around again. Woody Guthrie would recognize America today. — Billy Bragg

And although the world was just the same as it had always been as I travelled home on the Tube that evening, my view of it had been changed forever. — Billy Bragg

Mature material. Where once he had hollered through — Rick Bragg

One: Don't kill yourself.
Two: Don't kill each other.
Three: Try hard not to kill nobody else, but if you have to, better if it ain't fam'ly. — Rick Bragg

The atoms may be compared to the letters of the alphabet, which can be put together into innumerable ways to form words. So the atoms are combined in equal variety to form what are called molecules. — William Henry Bragg

The evil lot who did that thing on September 11 did it because they wanted to create a war between America and Islam. And by invading Iraq, we gave them what they hoped for. — Billy Bragg

It wasn't that I had gotten it right ... but that I had gotten true. — Rick Bragg

People who think there is something pedestrian about journalism are just ignorant. — Rick Bragg