Famous people who rubbished the idea of God and religion.

Famous Atheists

Albert Einstein

"I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religion than it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."

"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism."

"I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it."

"If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for a reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed."

-Albert Einstein, German-born American physicist

Aldous Huxley

"You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, intelligent enough."

-Aldous Huxley, author "Roots"

Andrew Carnegie

"I don’t believe in God. My god is patriotism. Teach a man to be a good citizen and you have solved the problem of life."

- Andrew Carnegie, Scottish-born American industrialist and philanthropist

Isaac Asimov

"I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say that one is an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or agnostic. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect that he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time."

"Creationists make it sound like a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night"

-Isaac Asimov, Russian-born - American author

Ernest Hemingway

"All thinking men are atheists."

On page 144 of Paul Johnson's book Intellectuals, it states that despite being raised in a strict Congregationalist household, Ernest "did not only not believe in God but regarded organized religion as a menace to human happiness", "seems to have been devoid of the religious spirit", and "ceased to practise religion at the earliest possible moment."
Other's have pointed out that Hemingway used the non-existence of God as a theme in his books.

- Ernest Hemingway, American author (1899-1961).

Bertrand Russell

"Religion is based . . . mainly on fear . . . fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. . . . My own view on 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."

"Fear is the parent of cruelty, therefore it is no wonder if religion and cruelty have gone hand-in-hand."

"I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young, and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is none the less true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting."

"I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out."

- Bertrand Russell, British philosopher, educator, mathematician, and social critic (1872-1970).

John Stuart Mill

"The time appears to me to have come when it is the duty of all to make their dissent from religion known."

- John Stuart Mill, English philosopher and economist (1806-1873). Freethinker, if not strictly atheist.

George Orwell (1903-1950).

Orwell's biography calls him an atheist. His books also have themes that are explicitly and/or suggestively anti-religious. In Animal Farm, the parody was a raven named Moses who told the animals stories about a great mountain in the sky that they would go to when they died, called Sugar Candy Mountain. In 1984, the concept of Big Brother is a parody of God: You never see him, but the fact of him is drilled into so many people's minds that they become robots, almost. Plus, if you speak bad against Big Brother, it's a Thoughtcrime.

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