Greg Graffin Quotes

We should enjoy and make the most of life, not because we are in constant fear of what might happen to us in a mythical afterlife, but because we have only one opportunity to live.

PUNK IS: the personal expression of uniqueness that comes from the experiences of growing up in touch with our human ability to reason and ask questions.

It's my firm conclusion that human meaning comes from humans, not from a supernatural source. After we die, our hopes for an afterlife reside in the social networks that we influenced while we were alive. If we influence people in a positive way -- even if our social web is only as big as our nuclear family -- others will want to emulate us and pass on our ideas, manners, and lifestyle to future generations. This is more than enough motivation for me to do good things in my life and teach my children to do the same.

It’s a similar feeling from being in a community of punk rockers as a teenager and the feeling I still get today when I’m in a community of skeptical scientists. The idea with both is that you challenge authority, you challenge the dogma. You challenge the doctrine in order to make progress. The thrill of science is the process. It’s a social process. It’s a process of collective discovery. It’s debate, it’s experimentation and it’s verification of claims that might be false. It’s the greatest foundation for a society.

You can't let your personal disposition be dictated by the world around you.

Whether you reach a lot of people or have a profound impact on a few people, their memories of you are your afterlife.

Humans impart meaning and purpose to almost all aspects of life. This sense of meaning and purpose gives us a road map for how to live a good life. This guidance emerges spontaneously from the interactions of human beings living in societies and thinking together about how best to get along. It doesn't require a god or sacred text.

Our faith should be expressed in working toward a better planet for our children and not the selfish, juvenile hope for a better afterlife for ourselves. I don't think anyone is going to Hell, because it only exists in the minds of people who wish ill will on others.

I don't bill myself as an atheist but as a naturalist. Naturalism is a belief system. A lot of scientists bristle at that. We all have to believe we can find the truth. Evidence is my guide. I rely on observation, experimentation and verification.

I don't think workaholic is in the dictionary as an affliction, but it's obviously someone who has a disease, and I don't feel diseased by it. I just think that I enjoy life and life has many offerings. I feel lucky to be able to have a forum to share a lot of these ideas.

I don't believe, for instance, that evolutionary biology or any scientific endeavor has much to say about love. I'm sure a lot can be learned about the importance of hormones and their effects on our feelings. But do the bleak implications of evolution have any impact on the love I feel for my family? Do they make me more likely to break the law of flaunt society's expectations of me? No. I simply does not follow that human relationships are meaningless just because we live in a godless universe subject to the natural laws of biology.

I'm trying to champion the naturalist's worldview and show it's not as heathen as most religious people would make it out to be.

Almost everyone shuts down when science becomes too technical; you've got to infuse it with entertainment and storytelling to make it effective. From high school on, science is taught in a very dry manner, which isn't as potent.

there is no such thing as hell but you can make it if you try

Science is very vibrant. There are always new observations to be found. And it's all in the interest in challenging the authority that came before you. That's consistent with the punk rock ethos that suggests that you should not take what people say at face value.

If you can believe in God, then you can believe in anything. It's a gang mentality.

As I’ve said, I’ve never believed in God, which technically makes me an atheist (since the prefix “a” means “not” or “without”). But I have problems with the word “atheism.” It defines what someone is not rather than what someone is. It would be like calling me an a-instrumentalist for Bad Religion rather than the band’s singer. Defining yourself as against something says very little about what you are for.

Naturalism teaches one of the most important things in this world. There is only this life, so live wonderfully and meaningfully.

I would say there's a lot of similarity between folk and punk. It's written for the common man.

The thread of culture that runs through the entire history of punk is also a dedication to challenging the authoritarian.

You can look at Bad Religion, and, really, almost everything I've ever done was an exercise in creativity. I've always had a desire to challenge and question authority, and that's where the fire inside comes from. I challenged authority out of a desire to make things better, not to be nihilistic about it.

So much of the habitat destruction and pollution is based on the simple principle that we somehow have been given free license over other species to degrade the planet.

Life is never static. Despite catastrophic tragedies, life has persisted in evolving new varieties of unimaginable forms. I find comfort in the narrative of evolutionary history.

Whether or not punk is the flavor of the month is not important for us. Bad Religion has been popular through many different climates. When heavy metal was popular, when new wave was popular, Bad Religion was still there underneath the mainstream selling more and more records.

My science teachers always encouraged their classes to 'go out and discover something' because all scientific endeavors depend on observation and experimentation. Through such pursuits, anyone can find something new to science, and if it's truly novel, the entire edifice of science might have to be restructured.

If there is no destiny, there is no design. There's only life and death. My goal is to learn about life by living it, not by trying to figure out a cryptic plan that the Creator had in store for me.

I definitely was attracted to similar things in punk and science. They both depend on a healthy dose of skepticism.

A fossil is so powerful. It's moving. This is my ancestor. The naturalist is moved by the fossil... not the cross.

A lot of philosophy is bull***t, but a lot of it is what we write songs about too. And it's organizing your thoughts, organizing your intellect.

We should enjoy and make the most of life

Dont take Portlandia too personally - Its just a stupid TV show

You can't take up all the music bins at a CD retail outlet with Spice Girls CDs and leave nothing for the Joan Jett catalogue.

We delude ourselves into believing that morality comes from somewhere else, whereas in reality we behave as we've been told to behave.

I don't think anyone is going to Hell, because it only exists in the minds of people who wish ill will on others.

Bad Religion has never been about criticizing people who are Christian. But we've always been about pointing out the irony and contradictions in Christian theology and the more extreme versions of Christians that seek to challenge modern secularism.

It's been an objective of mine since I started writing songs to include both intellect and energy.

There are certain ways you have to delude yourself. Self-delusion is important, for instance in family life. You know what I mean? If you're in love with your wife you have to go in there with blind faith. You have to support everything. And with your kids, you have to believe that you're doing something that has higher purpose; even though you don't have any evidence that that's the way it's going to turn out.

Most songwriters who have been lucky enough to have their song on the radio or be heard widely don't know anything about science. The best songs have a strong dose of metaphor. Most songs about science don't have that. Like 'She Blinded Me With Science.' It's a stupid song, no offense to Thomas Dolby.

One of our great thematic traditions in Bad Religion has been to question human nature.

This era in human existence where so much information is out there, it's easy for someone like Donald Trump to use that to make his claim that information is fake news. And there are people who think 'I guess we should believe the President when he says it's fake news.'

I want some fact-based evidence about where we came from. Things we consider mysterious need not be attributed to a deity.

It gives evolutionary biologists great status if they champion competition and the economists have to consult them. The economists have to consult the evolutionary biologists, because they are the ones who invented the idea of competition. It comes from the field of evolution.

There's going to be competition because there are not enough resources. Resources grow arithmetically, populations grow exponentially. You can't ever have enough resources and that's the foundation of this idea of competition.

It's extremely hard to get rid of any population. When they say polio is essentially wiped out, it's not. If we let up on the vaccinations, it will make a come back.

Here's the thing, who cares what you have to look at, I'm a big advocate of not obscuring vistas, but even if you build the biggest wind farm, can it run anything more than a domestic washer and dryer and a computer, for the year? I'm sorry guys, the answer, you're going to be shocked to know: it ain't much more than that.

Creativity is a challenge. It requires us to be fully human -- autonomous yet engaged, independent yet interdependent. Creativity bridges the conflict between our individualistic and our sociality. It celebrates the commonality of our species while simultaneously setting us apart as unique individuals.

Folk music usually has an emphasis on the lyrics and melody. And those lyrics are usually relevant in some way. And it's populist in scope, which is also true of Bad Religion. So it's more meant to draw some parallels between the two. And I think even my voice and my delivery can be thought of as a little bit folky.

Unfortunately, the average guy on the street believes that studying evolution leads to atheism.

I have great hope and faith, but it's a humanistic faith based in facts; you have to believe that facts exist. We can all arrive at the same facts if we engage in the process of experimentation, observation, and verification, which can solve more of the world's major problems than a debate over whether God does or doesn't exist.

The vocal arrangements are a big part of the formula for a Bad Religion song - layered harmonies and background vocals. So when I start to describe the elements of Bad Religion's sound, it starts to sound like a Christmas choir.