Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We should enjoy and make the most of life
For me, the existence of nonexistence of God is a nonissue.
I've always been on a quest to use science in an artful way.
there is no such thing as hell but you can make it if you try
Dont take Portlandia too personally - Its just a stupid TV show
You can't let your personal disposition be dictated by the world around you.
If you can believe in God, then you can believe in anything. It's a gang mentality.
One of our great thematic traditions in Bad Religion has been to question human nature.
I would say there's a lot of similarity between folk and punk. It's written for the common man.
....the songs are universal enough that in ten years time they should still hold up quite well.
Unfortunately, the average guy on the street believes that studying evolution leads to atheism.
It's been an objective of mine since I started writing songs to include both intellect and energy.
I usually am thinking about my next book the second I put the last dot on the previous one that I turn in.
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.
I definitely was attracted to similar things in punk and science. They both depend on a healthy dose of skepticism.
Whether you reach a lot of people or have a profound impact on a few people, their memories of you are your afterlife.
The thread of culture that runs through the entire history of punk is also a dedication to challenging the authoritarian.
I want some fact-based evidence about where we came from. Things we consider mysterious need not be attributed to a deity.
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.
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.
Naturalism teaches one of the most important things in this world. There is only this life, so live wonderfully and meaningfully.
We delude ourselves into believing that morality comes from somewhere else, whereas in reality we behave as we've been told to behave.
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.
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.
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.
Let's face it: There are people who are extremists in every corner of society, and whatever flag they're waving is something Bad Religion has stood against.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As a scientist, of course, we have to believe there is no supernatural. There are only natural entities in the universe. And those are the things that we study as natural scientists.
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.
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.
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.
Bad Religion's tradition has always been to try and provoke people but hopefully lead them to a better sense of who they are and what they stand for. That's supposed to make them feel better.
Ideologically, the pursuit of science is not that different from the ideology that goes into punk rock. The idea of challenging authority is consistent with what I have been taught as a scientist.
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.
Science is the first expression of punk, because it doesn't advance without challenging authority. It doesn't make progress without tearing down what was there before and building upon the structure.
I was never raised with the traditional story of creation in religion, and because of that I think I had a lot of questions. And evolution, the evolutionary narrative, helped provide some of that for me.
It's not a random chance that we have Alanis Morissette. She didn't evolve out of a null and void. She came from a former template. She borrowed styles and sounds from a very limited set of other artists.
I've known a lot of people who were punkers who went on to get academic degrees. Very few of them, however, continued their active role in the punk community. Most of them hung up their leather jacket when they did so.
In the 1970s, we had Carl Sagan, and he was so suave with his turtleneck and his tweed jacket. And he was, you know, he made science look cool. And in punk rock, we haven't had that. We haven't had the Carl Sagan of punk.
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.
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.
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.