Who are some famous atheists?

Among the atheists, I'll also include other freethinkers such as deists and agnostics:

Benjamin Franklin -- American Founding Father

"I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life, I absenteed myself from Christian assemblies."

"Lighthouses are more helpful than churches."

John Adams -- U.S. President & Founding Father

"Where do we find a precept in the Bible for Creeds, Confessions, Doctrines and Oaths, and whole carloads of other trumpery that we find religion encumbered with in these days?"

"The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity."

"This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it."

Abraham Lincoln -- American president (1809-1865)

"The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma."

Aldous Huxley -- author "Brave New World"

"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."

Ernest Hemingway -- American author

"All thinking men are atheists."

Albert Einstein -- physicist

"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."

Isaac Asimov, Russian-born --author

"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."

Galileo Galilei -- astronomer

"They know that it is human nature to take up causes whereby a man may oppress his neighbor, no matter how unjustly. ... Hence they have had no trouble in finding men who would preach the damnability and heresy of the new doctrine from the very pulpit."

George Bernard Shaw -- playwright

"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one."

"At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world."

Frank Lloyd Wright -- architect

"I believe in God, only I spell it Nature."

Samuel Clemens ("Mark Twain") -- author

"Faith is believing something you know ain’t true."

"If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be -- a Christian."

"It (the Bible) is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies."

"A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows."

"Our Bible reveals to us the character of our god with minute and remorseless exactness... It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light … by contrast."

"I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious -- unless he purposely shut the eyes of his mind & keep them shut by force."

"If there is a God, he is a malign thug."

"'In God We Trust.' I don't believe it would sound any better if it were true."

"It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand."

"Man is a marvelous curiosity . . . he thinks he is the Creator's pet . . . he even believes the Creator loves him; has a passion for him; sits up nights to admire him; yes and watch over him and keep him out of trouble. He prays to him and thinks He listens. Isn't it a quaint idea."

Mr. Clemens was once asked whether he feared death. He said that he did not, in view of the fact that he had been dead for billions and billions of years before he was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

Robert Frost -- poet

"I turned to speak to God, About the world's despair; But to make bad matters worse, I found God wasn't there."

"Forgive, O Lord, my little joke on Thee and I'll forgive Thy great big one on me."

"I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way."

Susan B. Anthony -- suffragist

"I was born a heretic. I always distrust people who know so much about what God wants them to do to their fellows."

Vincent Van Gogh -- painter

"I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create."

Thomas Edison -- inventor

"Religion is all bunk."

"I cannot believe in the immortality of the soul.... No, all this talk of an existence for us, as individuals, beyond the grave is wrong. It is born of our tenacity of life – our desire to go on living … our dread of coming to an end."