Greg Graffin Quotes

If you accept learning as a dominant determination of your behavior, then all of a sudden you're open to the idea that, for instance, there are other people who are more educated than you about the environment, who you will learn from. It's kind of like you don't even have to believe that you know anything about the environment, but you do have to understand that your behavior has been determined by learning in the past.

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

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

Society has to be structured such that there are checks and balances, so that it can't be manipulated, for instance, for the profit of just some multinational company who's going to get rich on trying to legislate the environment.

I was in a choir as a kid. It was from those early days that my outlook on harmonies and arrangements were nurtured. I always took that with me, even on the earliest Bad Religion record, which strangely was only about six years after that.

People need to understand the basics of evolution if they are going to reject it—otherwise, they are not contributing anything productive to modern society.

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.

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.

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 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.

I've written almost 200 songs with Bad Religion. No matter where you look in our history, the focus has been trying to instill some of these disturbing realities about the world, some of the implications of evolution into an artistic format that can be interpreted by people who may never study evolution.

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

When we look back on this time and we are going to see what the Internet brought us, and social media brought us, I think people are going to say 'how did people know anything in those years, during that particular time in history?' Because there is so much disorganization in the information.

I'm a biologist, so... Which I think should be mandatory. Biology should be mandatory. Mathematics? They say we don't know enough about math and science. Well we don't know enough about science and particularly biology, which is such a huge field.

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

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

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

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.

I'm saying that there were many great naturalists before Darwin's time who were very pious people and who knew more about nature than most of us. These were great naturalists; people I would admire for their knowledge of natural science given the time.

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

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.

There is so much in this world to be skeptical about if you want to be a skeptical a**hole. I'm kind of a skeptical a**hole. But not about vaccines, that's just not one of them.

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.

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.

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

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.

When I create, I feel that I am a participant in the grand pageant of life, a part of the ongoing creative engine of the universe. I don't know if that feeling is enough to replace the solace of religion in the lives of most people, but it is for me.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I believe in strong legislation for the environment. So the only question is being smart enough and educated enough to scrutinize the people who are writing the legislation, because there are plenty of ulterior motives out there.

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.

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

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

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.

I've always been on a quest to use science in an artful way.

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.

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.

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.

The problem is, as a company, if you attempt to streamline knowledge or try to limit information you get accused of censorship. So they have to open the gates to any a**hole's opinion. It's like 'oh that opinion is valid'. No, it's not. Not all opinions are valid, you know? It's this idea that every kid gets a trophy. Yeah, but someone won the game!

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

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.

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.

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.

I usually am thinking about my next book the second I put the last dot on the previous one that I turn in.

Knowledge is organized data. For it to be shelved as human knowledge it's got to be predictable, repeatable, all the basics of scientific validation have to be there.