An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to uptime causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the Universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and you be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed.

— Carl Sagan

An atheist is someone who is disappointed in his search of god. He is a man who strongly needed god but couldn't find him. Atheism is a cry of despair

— Bangambiki Habyarimana

A number of our scientists boast intelligence but lack wisdom. I find those to be the predictable ones.

— Criss Jami

Are there any religions on your list that include the slaughter of noblemen as a holy duty?

— Brandon Sanderson

As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because, when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.

— Bertrand Russell

As I work in the afternoon on committing to paper some of my morning's thoughts, I find myself just about to close on the knotty question of whether I believe in God. In fact, I am about to type, 'I do not believe in God', when the sky goes black as ink, there is a thunderclap and a huge crash of thunder and a downpour of epic proportions. I never do complete the sentence.

— Michael Palin

As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or do not exist. For many are the obstacles that impede knowledge, both the obscurity of the question and the shortness of human life.

— Diogenes Laërtius

Atheism and agnosticism signify the rejection of certain images and concepts of God or of truth, which are historically conditioned and therefore inadequate. Atheism is a challenge to religion to purify its images and concepts and come nearer to the truth of divine mystery.

— Bede Griffiths

Atheism is the default position in any scientific inquiry, just as aquarium or a-neutrinoism was. That is, any entity has to earn its admission into a scientific account either via direct evidence for its existence or because it plays some fundamental explanatory role. Before the theoretical need for neutrinos was appreciated (to preserve the conservation of energy) and then later experimental detection was made, they were not part of the accepted physical account of the world. To say physicists in 1900 were 'agnostic' about neutrinos sounds wrong: they just did not believe there were such things. As yet, there is no direct experimental evidence of a deity, and in order for the postulation of a deity to play an explanatory role there would have to be a lot of detail about how it would act. If, as you have suggested, we are not “good judges of how the deity would behave,” then such an unknown and unpredictable deity cannot provide good explanatory grounds for any phenomenon. The problem with the 'minimal view' is that in trying to be as vague as possible about the nature and motivation of the deity, the hypothesis loses any explanatory force, and so cannot be admitted on scientific grounds. Of course, as the example of quarks and neutrinos shows, scientific accounts change in response to new data and new theory. The default position can be overcome.

— Tim Maudlin

Atheists are spiritual slackers, right? We are the stoners of the cosmos. We think we’re all over-intelligent, free-thinking, free-spirited, Uber-cool, hippy-dippy, science-minded, leaning-to-the-left, hedonistic, children of Theodorus the Atheist. Furthermore, we’re all like “Dude, I need no stinkin’ deity” and if we came face-to-face with the Grim Reaper himself we’d say, “No worries, Bro, let’s do this! Game over!

— T. K. Decker