Religion looms as large as an elephant in the United States, to the point that being nonreligious is about the biggest handicap a politician running for office can have, bigger than being gay, unmarried, thrice married, or black.
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.
But the whole point of the Sixties was that you had to take people as they were. If you came in with us you left your class, and colour, and religion behind, that was what the Sixties was all about.
There was a strong focus on performance and respect for people. And one of the points that my father always made was that with all the challenges and obstacles and barriers, the one thing you can control is your performance. And that is one thing I h...
Some things tend not to work so well for science - things that rely on substantial written contributions by key experts are a case in point - but even there I tend to keep an open mind, because it may just be a case of finding the right formula.
The modern mind tends to be more and more critical and analytical in spirit, hence it must devise for itself an engine of expression which is logically defensible at every point and which tends to correspond to the rigorous spirit of modern science.
My father was career military. He was a veteran, he was a doctor of political science, he taught at West Point and Air Command Staff and lectured at the War College.
I do not take steroids. I never have. It's sad to me that people want to point fingers. I don't do that. That's not me. I wouldn't feel like a human being.
Look what's happened to Barack Obama over the last two years or George Bush for eight. It's a blood sport. But at some point I may feel the need to run for office again.
Obviously, I try to make the films work for an audience. That's the main point of making a film, and in retrospect, one can see that certain films, let's say Leaving Las Vegas, demonstrated its own success.
I think so many times in our society we focus so much on just the end result; when we finally reach that point we realize that was never the true goal.
At one point in time or another, everyone's an outcast, and you have to deal with those sort of issues in society. Especially for teenage kids, I don't think there's anyone that's really been through childhood and not been an outcast in one way or an...
In a very alert and bright state of society people learn co-operation by themselves, but in older and quieter conditions of laboring enterprise, such a bill as I propose will point out the way to mutual exertion.
A museum is like a valuing machine. Museums and the industrial society started at the same moment, and they're really tied into each other. They've been all about displaying objects and the kind of wealth that can be derived from objects and promotin...
There is no teacher, living or past, who can give us the actual understanding of Truth. A teacher can only put our feet upon the path and point the way. That is all. It is wholly dependent on the individual to make his way to Truth.
I love my parents in the way most children would: for having been there at every point in my youth and childhood, ready to pick me up when I fell and support me when I stumbled.
At some point, you're just happy to be a working actor, but to be able to do it with people you really love and enjoy spending time with, it's just such a rare thing. You hear so many horror stories.
And in the middle of one of those scenes, I suddenly felt my heart just open: it was overwhelming, to the point where I got teary-eyed. Never would I have thought anything like that could happen in a love scene.
I couldn't love a woman who inspired me to be totally disinterested. If I fell in love with a woman for an artistic reason, or from the point of view of my work, I think it would rob her of something.
I couldn't imagine what it's like to be a journalist talking about music. You're left with empty descriptions; you probably have to make up a sort of weird cocktail of band influences and references to other music to get your point across.
As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place. Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.