Lawrence Bragg Quotes

We really think it is a good thing for scientists to spend a little bit of their time either in the community or in schools or helping to train high school teachers.

There is not enough funding for basic sciences in India. We have to invest in a big way, and I am pushing that idea.

I'm a great believer that scientists should spend as much time as possible explaining, and you do explain in the process of teaching.

The people who work in the scientific field, they need help to convey what it's about.

If you want to go beyond that small percentage of people who are already environmentally and scientifically aware, you have to make your work somehow link with a passion, interest, or profession of someone who isn't interested in science or nature.

Sometimes I worry that science communication is just preaching to the choir, speaking to the converted. Social media gives us an amazing opportunity to reach new people.

Somehow we must reintegrate the scientific with the popular and reconnect the future to the present. This is less a job for scientists, engineers, bureaucrats, and administrators and more a job for novelists, moviemakers, popularizers, and politicians.

My mom was a high school science teacher for decades. She just never made it feel like we had to choose between the arts and the sciences. We had bookshelves full of novels, and she also had Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold and Carl Sagan.

American sci-fi has fallen into the doldrums in part because of the anti-science sentiment that's so prevalent in our culture lately.

One of the best and most responsible things a scientist can do is to write for the popular press.

When NASA makes discoveries they are profound and they make headlines, everyone takes notice. It drives dialogue and, today, it would drive the blogosphere. It would drive the projects the kids do in school. So you wouldn't even need programs to try and stimulate curiosity. You wouldn't need programs to try to convince people that science literacy is good. Because they're going to want to participate on this epic adventure that we call space exploration.

No news conferences? Interviews now only with friendly journalists? You can't be president or vice president and govern in that style, as a sequestered figure. This has been Mr. Bush's style the past few years, and see where it got us. You must address America in its entirety, not as a sliver or a series of slivers but as a full and whole entity, a great nation trying to hold together. When you don't, when you play only to your little piece, you contribute to its fracturing.

The study of science teaches young men to think, while study of the classics teaches them to express thought.

There may be other reasons for a man's not speaking in publick than want of resolution: he may have nothing to say.

For me, the real goal is to integrate. The thing that I'm most happy with is the fact that I've been able to keep doing all of it - to keep writing, and to keep acting in movies, and to keep acting on the stage, to keep directing plays. I find that they feed each other, and that I learn about acting from directing and I learn about writing from acting.

God gave you that gifted tongue of yours, and set it between your teeth, to make known your true meaning to us, not to be rattled like a muffin man's bell.

Good, the more communicated, more abundant grows.

The most important things must be said simply, for they are spoiled by bombast; whereas trivial things must be described grandly, for they are supported only by aptness of expression, tone and manner.

I have the right of education. I have the right to play. I have the right to sing. I have the right to talk. I have the right to go to market. I have the right to speak up.

Where strictness of grammar does not weaken expression, it should be attended to. . . . But where, by small grammatical negligences, the energy of an idea is condensed, or a word stands for a sentence, I hold grammatical rigor in contempt.

Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.

It is not enough that a man has clearness of vision, and reliance on sincerity, he must also have the art of expression, or he will remain obscure.

In this box are all the words I know… Most of them you will never need, some you will use constantly, but with them you may ask all the questions which have never been answered and answer all the questions which have never been asked. All the great books of the past and all the ones yet to come are made with these words. With them there is no obstacle you cannot overcome. All you must learn to do is use them well and in the right places.

Grammar is a piano I play by ear.

Thus, if the clarity of our thoughts comes through better in a play of words, then the wordplay is good. One must know how to enter the ideas of others and how to leave them.