Billy Bragg Quotes

You have committed a crime against us and against the Revolution, Mayakovsky. All your words thunder with a voice like Niagara Falls. Mayakovsky, you have betrayed us.

The biggest rebellion I could've ever had with my father would be to work in a bank. He would have disowned me. As long as I was doing something where I didn't have to wear a tie, I was good.

I'm such a Goody Two-shoes, but I get a vicarious thrill at someone sticking it to the Man.

I know the law... I am it's greatest transgressor.

The more she rejected us the more convinced I was that she was another version of the real Molly, her disdain for authority, her scepticism that she had to do what the white man told her because it was good for her... She is Molly.

I'm not letting him write anything. I didn't do anything. I just took his pen.

I didn't want to deal in poetry. I got rid of that after a few months.

Our young people in increasing numbers are rejecting all forms or authority.

From this window we see the palace where the King is misled by perfidious counsels. Terror and fear have often issued from yon palace: let them return to-day in the name of the law, and let all those who inhabit that palace know that the King is alone inviolable, that the law will strike down the guilty without respect of persons, and that there is not a guilty head which can escape its sword.

Sin is the reason we rebel against authority.

I'd not want to answer for the lives of other men; not at seventeen, by God's Grace.

But again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is one of knowing whether two and two do make four

One of the very first poems I wrote was Docker That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic and one of the sturdiest was Requiem for the Croppies, written 50 years after 1916 [the year of the Easter Rising]. Being responsible and what it means, what it demands, have indeed preoccupied me maybe too much. But this is it, this is the thing, this is what you're up against.

I really don't have to answer to nobody.

My rebellion was telling my dad, "No, you're wrong, you don't know what's best for me. I'm not gonna waste my time in college." You know the story. He thought he was an abject failure 'cause he didn't convince me to go to college. I didn't rebel against my dad's economic status. I didn't rebel against what I thought were old-fashioned, archaic moral values. I didn't rebel by going out and wrecking the car and getting drunk and being irresponsible. I rebelled against their assumption they knew better than I did, what I wanted, and what I needed.

They (the poets) are to us in a manner the fathers and authors of the wisdom.

I had been brought up in a church which decides everything and permits no doubts, so that having rejected one article of faith I was forced to reject the rest.

Answers given with authority negate the search for truth.

So far from being able to answer for my sins, I cannot even answer for my righteousness!

As for being responsible or irresponsible, we don't recognize those notions, they're for policemen and courtroom psychiatrists.

We were all imitative. We all wandered in after Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay. We were all being dashing and gallant, declaring we weren't virgins, whether we were or not.

It was also never wanting to be part of any group or movement or anything that was the done thing. I hated organization. When you have a group, you have a leader who is going to put down the rest of the group.

Those whose conscience demands that they defy authority in some ways that involve great consequences must be willing to accept some penalty.

The poet dreams of the classroom I dreamed I stood up in class And I said aloud: Teacher, Why is algebra important? Sit down, he said. Then I dreamed I stood up And I said: Teacher, I’m weary of the turkeys That we have to draw every fall. May I draw a fox instead? Sit down, he said. Then I dreamed I stood up once more and said: Teacher, My heart is falling asleep And it wants to wake up. It needs to be outside. Sit down, he said.

Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.