Heine's works carry many caustic references to religion — and a warning: "Wherever books will be burned, men also, in the end, are burned.

"All Christendom professes to receive the Bible as the word of God, and what does it avail?"

It was Gustave Flaubert who said, “It is necessary to sleep upon the pillow of doubt.”

"In regard to religious matters," he wrote, "there is an intellectual cowardice instilled into the minds of the people from their infancy; to inquire or exert their reason is denounced as sinful."

As his own end drew near, Berlioz maintained his disbelief in God and immortality. In one of his last letters, written shortly before his death, Berlioz wrote his creed: "I believe nothing."

Averroës, in his own beliefs, substituted a vague Pantheism or World-Soul for the impersonal God of Aristotle. He did not believe in personal immortality.

If a man has a right to find God in his own way, he has a right to go to the devil in his own way also.

"I also particularly like [Freud] because he was an atheist, and I grew tired of religion some time not long after birth. ... I don't believe something I can have absolutely no evidence of for millenniums."

"The fable of a god or gods visiting the earth did not originate with Christianity."

Mascagni himself had no religious belief. His biographer, Giannotto Bastianelli, says that he was a pagan even in his religious compositions.