“When H. L. Mencken unpacks his idiomatic brasses, tunes up his verbal strings, and gets in readiness his phrasal wood winds to orchestrate a fugue in damnation or in praise of man, god or book, his all too meagre audience cancels all other engagements to be on hand at the initial presentation. The result, that audience knows, will be an experience of pure enjoyment.”

— Burton Rascoe

" Fanfare http://englishatheist.org/mencken/Rascoe-Mencken.htm", in H. L. Mencken (1920) http://www.archive.org/details/hlmencken00newyrich
Context: When H. L. Mencken unpacks his idiomatic brasses, tunes up his verbal strings, and gets in readiness his phrasal wood winds to orchestrate a fugue in damnation or in praise of man, god or book, his all too meagre audience cancels all other engagements to be on hand at the initial presentation. The result, that audience knows, will be an experience of pure enjoyment. His musicianship is unfailing. His program is unsatisfactory only in its impermanence. Though the theme he proposes is invariably Mencken — Mencken apropos of this or that — he gives it infinite and intricate variations.

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Burton Rascoe 10

American writer 1892–1957

Kenneth Tynan (1927–1980) English theatre critic and writer

On singer Frankie Laine
Curtains (1961)

“Remote from man, with God he passed the days;
Prayer all his business, all his pleasure praise.”

Thomas Parnell (1679–1718) Anglo-Irish cleric, writer and poet.

The Hermit, line 5.

“The highest truth is this: God is present in all beings. They are His multiple forms. There is no other God to seek.... It is a man-making religion that we want.... Give up these weakening mysticisms, and be strong.... For the next fifty years. … let all other gods disappear from our minds. This is the only God that is awake, our own race, everywhere His hands, everywhere His feet, everywhere His ears; He covers everything.... The first of all worships is the worship of those all around us. … He alone serves God who serves all other beings.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Quoted from Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage.

“Evil is the result of what happens when man does not have God's love present in his heart.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Attributed in emails in 1999, as debunked at "Malice of Absence" at Snopes.com http://www.snopes.com/religion/einstein.asp#MX2FyfdMLHissI4T.99
This statement has been attributed to others before Einstein; its first attribution to Einstein appears to have been in an email story that began circulating in 2004. See the Urban Legends Reference Pages http://www.snopes.com/religion/einstein.asp for more discussion.
Misattributed
Variant: Evil is the absence of God.

“Now, practically all reviewers have academic aspirations. The people from the universities are used to a captive audience, but the literary journalist has to please his audience.”

V.S. Pritchett (1900–1997) British writer and critic

As quoted in "V.S. Pritchett Himself" http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/06/18/specials/theroux-pritchett.html?_r=1&oref=slogin by Paul Theroux in The New York Times (22 May 1977)