Marie Curie (1867) It was on this date, November 7, 1867, that French chemist and nuclear physicist Marie Curie was born Maria Salomea Skłodowska in Warsaw, Poland. She was brought up a Catholic by her mother, but her father was a freethinker and provided her with some scientific training. She abandoned Catholicism before she was […]

Charles Richet (1850) It was on this date, August 26, 1850, that French physiologist Charles Richet was born in Paris. The son of a surgeon, Richet entered medical school but anatomy and surgery bored him, so he wrote poetry and drama as a diversion. He became a hospital intern on a women's ward and there […]

"I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and the angels. I have enough for this life."

Marquez attacks religion by poking fun at the Christian practice of paying collections to the church and acting pious in exchange for answered prayers. “I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of Him,” he said.

“At first sight nothing seems more obvious than that everything has a beginning and an end… The prodigious development of physics has now reached the same conclusion…”

In her 1991 Nobel lecture, Gordimer makes a brilliant if veiled charge, using theistic language, that writers are more powerful with their words than religions are with their dogmas.

Albert Camus (1913) It was on this date, November 7, 1913, that French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria. Camus studied philosophy with the idea of teaching it, but also discovered theater and journalism, working at those endeavors full time by 1938. In World War Two (1941) he joined the French Resistance […]