Greg Graffin
Greg Graffin
Gregory Walter Graffinis an American punk rock singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, college lecturer, and author. He is most recognized as the lead vocalist, songwriter, and only constant member of the noted Los Angeles band Bad Religion, which he co-founded in 1979. He also embarked on a solo career in 1997, when he released the album American Lesion. His follow-up album, Cold as the Clay was released nine years later. Graffin obtained his PhD at Cornell University and has lectured courses in life...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMusician
Date of Birth6 November 1964
CountryUnited States of America
Greg Graffin quotes about
there is no such thing as hell but you can make it if you try
You can't let your personal disposition be dictated by the world around you.
The thread of culture that runs through the entire history of punk is also a dedication to challenging the authoritarian.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
A fossil is so powerful. It's moving. This is my ancestor. The naturalist is moved by the fossil... not the cross.
One of our great thematic traditions in Bad Religion has been to question human nature.
For me, the existence of nonexistence of God is a nonissue.
I want some fact-based evidence about where we came from. Things we consider mysterious need not be attributed to a deity.