"Fortunately I was brought up in a family in which religion played almost no part whatsoever."

“There is no record of his ever attending church service or observing the orthodoxy of his religion. He never went to confession. ... Generally he viewed priests with mistrust.”

“I believe nothing.”

"There is no harm in musical sounds. It matters not whether it is fast ragtime or a slow melody like 'The Rosary.' "

"However, in adult life, although retaining strong memories of the music he heard in the synagogue and at Jewish weddings, Copland evidenced little direct connection with Judaism or Jewish culture. He was neither religious nor observant."

“Religion is a means of exploitation employed by the strong against the weak; religion is a cloak of ambition, injustice and vice."

“Now that I'm closer than I was a year ago to the unknown, I'm very much an atheist and more so every day. I think we've invented God to give some sort of meaning to life because life doesn't have any meaning. We've certainly invented money for that and we've invented art for that. It helps us kill time before time kills us. I'm not in despair, but I'm melancholy most of the time. But if I died today I'm not ashamed of what I've created.”

“There is no reason why an atheist could not write a good Mass.”

INTERVIEWER: "Do you believe in God?"
MONK: "I don’t know nothing. Do you?”

"Like many nineteenth-century artists, Verdi was an agnostic whose elevated sense of morality and duty bypassed divine sanction. Strepponi, replying in 1871 to a friend bent on Verdi's conversion, at first wrote that, with the highest virtues, her husband was an atheist; she then revised this to 'I won't say an atheist, but certainly very little of a believer.' "

"[I]f ever I'm asked if I'm religious I always reply, 'Yes, I'm a devout musician.' Music puts me in touch with something beyond the intellect, something otherworldly, something sacred."

It Ain't Necessarily So

It ain't necessarily so, (repeat)
De t'ings dat yo' li'ble
To read in de Bible,
It ain't necessarily so.

Li'l David was small, but oh my! (repeat)
He fought big Goliath
Who lay down an' dieth!
Li'l David was small, but oh my!

Oh, Jonah, he lived in de whale, (repeat)
Fo' he made his home in
Dat fish's abdomen.
Oh, Jonah, he lived in de whale.

Li'l Moses was found in a stream, (repeat)
He floated on water
Till Ole Pharaoh's daughter
She fished him, she says, from that stream.

It ain't necessarily so, (repeat)
Dey tell all you chillun
De debble's a villun,
But 'tain't necessarily so.

To get into Hebben don' snap for a sebben!
Live clean! Don' have no fault.
Oh, I takes dat gospel
Whenever it's poss'ble,
But wid a grain of salt.

Methus'lah lived nine hundred years, (repeat)
But who calls dat livin'
When no gal'll give in
To no man what's nine hundred years?

I'm preachin' dis sermon to show,
It ain't nessa, ain't nessa,
ain't nessa, ain't nessa,
Ain't necessarily so.

"When asked if he believed in God, his reply was swift and firm: 'No, and I am very sorry about it.' "

"I had some pretty dark and desperate moments all those years ago. ... I didn't ever smash up a hotel room or throw a TV out a window. That was Led Zeppelin. Thank god. If there was a god, you know, which there isn't."

"I do not practise religion in accordance with the sacred rites. I have made mysterious Nature my religion. I do not believe that a man is any nearer to God for being clad in priestly garments, nor that one place in a town is better adapted to meditation than another." 

"Some of the preachers that promise you hamburgers in the hereafter get on my nerves; what I'd really like to do is to give 'em a hunk of blackberry pie right in the face."

"After his baptism, he never again attended Mass, and upon his untimely death in 1911 at age 50, there was no religious funeral service of any kind, nor any religious markings on his gravestone."

"Today they are lifting the bells into the tower. It would be nice if they weren’t calling people to bamboozling."

“What a blessing to know there’s a devil, and that I’m but a pawn in his game / that my impulse to sin doesn’t come from within, and so I’m not exactly to blame.” 

“Whoever dares to say: 'Outside the Church is no salvation,' ought to be driven from the State.

But I am mistaken in speaking of a Christian republic; the terms are mutually exclusive. Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence. Its spirit is so favorable to tyranny that it always profits by such a regime. True Christians are made to be slaves, and they know it and do not much mind: this short life counts for too little in their eyes.”

"When during my stay in Egypt I became familiar with the works of Nietzsche, whose polemic against Christianity was particularly to my liking, the antipathy which I had always felt against a religion which relieves the faithful of responsibility for their actions (by means of confession) was confirmed and strengthened."

"My sister died in ’41 of breast cancer, and I remember a rabbi saying that ‘God in his infinite wisdom has chosen to take this young girl.’ That was a point in my life that I said there couldn’t be any God."

I'm an atheist, but I'm a son of the [Armenian] people who were the first to officially adopt Christianity and thus visiting the Vatican was my duty."

“At home we didn't talk about religion. So, gradually the question faded away by itself and disappeared from the agenda. When I was nineteen, my father died; my response to his death was atheistic.”

"To violinist Stefi Geyer, he once wrote about his religious belief, calling the trinity a 'clumsy fable' that 'enslaves thought.' ... The existence of the universe did not require the hypothesis of a creator. 'Why don't we simply say: I can't explain the origin of its existence and leave it at that?' "

"What you write to me about the benefits of religion, we have spoken of it with Pierrette Haour, an atheist like me."

“I was brought up a Catholic, became an agnostic, flirted with Islam and now hold a position which may be termed Manichee. I believe the wrong God is temporarily ruling the world and that the true God has gone under. Thus I am a pessimist but believe the world has much solace to offer: love, food, music, the immense variety of race and language, literature and the pleasure of artistic creation.”

“The sooner you get rid of all this Christian humbug the better. The whole traditional concept of life is false. Throw those great Christian blinkers away, and look around you and stand on your own feet. ... Don't believe all the tommyrot priests tell you; learn and prove everything by your own experience."

“I am an atheist, I have no religious beliefs. And obviously I don’t believe in spirituality of some kind.”