Günther Anders (1902) It was on this date, July 12, 1902, that Austrian philosopher Günther Anders, originally Günther Siegmund Stern, was born in Breslau, the offspring of Clara and William Stern, founders of child psychology. An assimilated Jewish intellectual, he found that there were too many writers using the name Stern, so his editor suggested […]

Henry David Thoreau (1817) It was on this date, July 12, 1817, the writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts. He graduated Harvard in 1837 and discovered a talent for writing about nature. Thoreau embraced the Transcendentalist belief in personal insight and experience, but he was neither a critical nor a […]

There are in this country... a certain proportion of restless and turbulent spirits who must always have something to quarrel about with their neighbors. These people are the authors of religious revivals.

“The most preposterous notion that H. Sapiens has dreamed up is that the Lord God … wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures…. Yet this absurd fantasy … pays all the expenses of the … least productive industry in all history.”

Hawthorne never bothered to attend church as an adult and one biographer observes that, "His own family did not know what his opinions were."

Garibaldi wrote two years before his death and bluntly said, "Dear friends — Man created God, not God Man. Yours ever, Garibaldi."

In her novels, Sand frequently used the word "God," but described it as "an avatar of which the meaning is often an enigma."

Laughton's brothers invited a procession of priests to attend the dying man, as he lay drugged and gasping for air. Laughton mused, "I wish they were more intelligent."

Broca has been described as a Christian, but he must have practiced it lightly, because he founded a society for free-thinkers in 1848.

"God is too absent from his work, and there is no trace of the wonderful balm of mysticism."