About Christianity, Glass wrote, "Well, if that's the system: fine. I accept my damnation. I don't think it's a fair system. But fine. I just don't believe."

Gorbachev remains an Atheist, but in leading the establishment of religious freedom laws in the former Soviet Union he demonstrated respect for all religions.

Howells cast off his Swedenborgian creed in his youth and became a social liberal and a sentimental Theist. We can see this in his poem "Lost Beliefs."

When emphasizing his sincerity, Gaines would declare, "On my honor as an atheist..."

Montaigne was a Deist, but refrained from candor about his beliefs due to the mutual slaughter between Catholics and French Huguenots of the time. "It is setting a high value upon our opinions," he wrote, "to roast men and women alive on account of them."

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807) It was on this date, February 27, 1807, that the first American professional poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was born in coastal Portland, Maine. Although his father steered him toward a legal career, Henry was too in love with language to turn down the newly founded chair in modern languages at Bowdoin […]

To a census-taker, who asked him in 1872 if he was a Catholic, Hugo replied, "No. A Freethinker." Hugo predicted that Christianity would soon disappear, but men would still believe in God.

Although he was agnostic, the Catholic-born Moore he preferred to be regarded as a Protestant – even though Protestants, too, found his ideas about Jesus troublesome.

Boito’s only completed opera, “Mefistofele,” based on Goethe's “Faust,” infuriated the Italian clergy by his frivolous treatment of religion.

"The theology of the average colored church is basing itself far too much upon 'hell and damnation,'" wrote DuBois. Anti-rational dogma repelled him, and he ceased participating in organized worship as a young adult.