“I once wanted to become an atheist, but I gave up - they have no holidays.”

David Silverman, quoted in * 2010-09-28
Basic Religion Test Stumps Many Americans
Laurie Goodstein
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/us/28religion.html

Song lyrics, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963), Don't Think Twice, It's All Right

"The voice of the lonely crowd" (2002)
Context: My apostasy, at the age of nine, was vehement. Clearly, I didn't want the shared words, the shared identity. I forswore chapel; those Bibles were scribbled on and otherwise desecrated, and two or three of them were taken into the back garden and quietly torched.
Later — we were now in Cambridge — I gave a school speech in which I rejected all belief as an affront to common sense. I was an atheist, and I was 12: it seemed open-and-shut. I had not pondered Kant's rather lenient remark about the crooked timber of humanity, out of which nothing straight is ever built. Nor was I aware that the soul had legitimate needs.
Much more recently I reclassified myself as an agnostic. Atheism, it turns out, is not quite rational either. The sketchiest acquaintance with cosmology will tell you that the universe is not, or is not yet, decipherable by human beings. It will also tell you that the universe is far more bizarre, prodigious and chillingly grand than any doctrine, and that spiritual needs can be met by its contemplation. Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.

Kamal Hassan: A universal legend

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/funny_old_game/7004282.stm
Chelsea FC

Najib hopes that presidents in the future will be like Obama, quoted on Free Malaysia Today (February 16, 2016), "Najib hopes future US presidents will be like Obama" http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/nation/2016/02/16/najib-hopes-future-us-presidents-will-be-like-obama/

Fact and Faith (1934) Preface

Meaning of Life interview (2008)
Context: Well, God answers of course come in every flavor imaginable these days so God can be process-God can be mind-God … so there are all of these ways that God is now configured as well as the ones that come to us from traditional religions where God has much more power — then there's the whole personal God part which I do talk about in there at some point. So I don't think that even that there is a God framework out there at this point that I am either accepting or rejecting. My response is that I call myself a non-theist as opposed to an atheist because as I see an atheist as having a belief about God, i. e. that there isn't one. And my I've never been actually very interested in the question I guess is one way to put it. I see it as a question That can be summarized in the aphorism "Why is there anything at all rather than nothing." And science doesn't have any answer to That so what I articulated in the book and continued to do is what I call a covenant with mystery where mystery is itself a … noun but I am using it as literally in absence of category. It's not like I have a mystery then I put attributions onto it it just … I don't know the answers.

You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think (2009)