Quotes from Greg Graffin

I guess rock stars are role models for the kids who listen to that music. My role models have all been geologists - you know, the guys who are doing fieldwork until they're 70.

I bill myself as a naturalist because if you say you're a naturalist, it gives people a conversation point to talk about what you actually do believe in, instead of when you say you're an atheist, and it's really just a statement of what you don't believe in.

There are so many ways to characterize evolutionary success. If one criterion is the number of millions of years that the species persists, we're still just infants. We're way too young of a species to tell if we were a creative fluke or if we have any staying power.

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

I don't mind if other people call me an atheist, but I call myself a naturalist. Atheism doesn't tell you much about what I do believe in; the term naturalist opens up the discussion better.

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.

I struggled to keep one foot in music and one in academia. I had worked on my Ph.D. for three years full time before I realized Bad Religion could be a legitimate career.

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.

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 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 got interested in palaeontology and vertebrate history - sparked by books on human evolution - then vertebrate evolution. Studying with palaeontologists kindled my interest in fieldwork.

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.

From a very early age, I was in tune with pop radio, and most of this listening was done driving. We had an old '67 or '65 Buick LeSabre, and whenever we would drive around, I would actually stick my head right against the speakers in the back and sing along to the music.

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.

Bad Religion took a long time to develop into gold-record-status artists. Along the way we learned and applied our knowledge, and Atlantic helped us every step of the way, since 1993.

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.