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Thomas Paine wrote:
"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church."
Voltaire wrote in a letter:
"Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd, and bloody religion that has ever infected the world."
Clarence Darrow said in a speech:
"I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose."
President William Howard Taft said in a letter declining the presidency of Yale University:
"I do not believe in the divinity of Christ, and there are many other of the postulates of the orthodox creed to which I cannot subscribe."
Luther Burbank told a newspaper:
"As a scientist, I cannot help feeling that all religions are on a tottering foundation.... I am an infidel today. I do not believe what has been served to me to believe. I am a doubter, a questioner, a skeptic. When it can be proved to me that there is immortality, that there is resurrection beyond the gates of death, then I will believe. Until then, no."
Bertrand Russell wrote:
"My own view of religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race."
George Bernard Shaw said:
"At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world."
Leo Tolstoy wrote, in response to his excommunication by the Russian Orthodox Church:
"To regard Christ as God, and to pray to him, are to my mind the greatest possible sacrilege."
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