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John of Lackland, English King (1199-1216)

John may not have been a bonafide atheist, but he moved farther in that direction than was common in medieval times. From the biography, Eleanor of Aquitaine (John's mother) by Alison Weir, p. 234: "John's bad press in the monastic chronicles may be attributed to his failures as a king *and his cynical contempt for religion*; he quarrelled with the Church during his reign and was excommunicated. 'He led such a dissipated life that he ceased to believe in the resurrection of the dead and other articles of the Christian faith...'(Medieval chroniclers Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris; quoted in Weir). Once, upon seeing a buck slaughtered, at the end of a hunt, remarked 'You happy beast, never forced to patter prayers nor dragged to Holy Mass.'" (Paris, in Weir).

Frederick the Great, Prussian king (1712-1786).

". . . you will certainly grant me that neither antiquity nor whatever nation has devised a more repulsive and blasphemous absurdity than that of eating your God. This is the most disgusting dogma of Christian religion, the greatest insult to the Highest Being, the climax of madness and insanity."
(from a letter to Voltaire, March, 19, 1776)

Napoleon Bonaparte, French emperor (1769-1821).

A theist, for sure, but he knocked religion:
"Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet."
"All religions have been made by men."
"as for myself, I do not believe that such a person as Jesus Christ ever existed; but as the people are inclined to superstition, it is proper not to oppose them." [paraphrased]

Abraham Lincoln, American president (1809-1865).

In 2000 Years of Disbelief by James A. Haught, Lincoln is mentioned on pages 125 through 127. From the material presented it would seem that Lincoln as a young man was an avid anti-christian and most likely an atheist. In his later years, he came to believe in God, but still was anti-religious in the sense that he rejected organized religion. Some selections from Haught:
John T. Stuart, Lincoln's first law partner: "He was an avowed and open infidel, and sometimes bordered on Atheism...He went further against Christian beliefs and doctrines and principles than any man I ever heard."
Joseph Lewis quoting Lincoln in a 1924 speech in New York: "The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma."
Lincoln in a letter to Judge J.S. Wakefield, after the death of Willie Lincoln: "My earlier views of the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the scriptures have become clearer and stronger with advancing years, and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them."
As a young man Lincoln apparently wrote a manuscript that he planned to publish, which vehemently argued against the divine origin of the Bible and the Christian scheme of salvation. Samuel Hill, a friend and mentor, convinced him to drop it, considering the disastrous consequences it would have on his political career.
William H Herndon, a former law partner, wrote a biography on Lincoln titled: The True Story of a Great Life. In it Herndon discusses Lincoln's religious views extensively.
Gordon Leidner has collected some quotations from Lincoln's later years in which he invokes God, and he makes the argument that Lincoln became a sincere believer. It seems to me he did come to believe in God but never accepted organized Christianity.

William Howard Taft, American President and Chief Justice (1857-1930).

Probably not an atheist, but I thought it was interesting that an American president in this century said:
"I do not believe in the divinity of Christ and there are many other of the postulates of the orthodox creed to which I cannot subscribe."

Joseph Stalin, Soviet politician (1879-1953).

I believe Stalin called himself an atheist, but some would argue that he believed in the Hegelian doctrine of progress as a god

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Christopher Marlowe, English dramatist and poet (1564-1593).

"I count religion but a childish toy and hold there is no sin but innocence." - the character Machiavel, in The Jew of Malta, "Prologue." The lines are often modernized: "I count religion but a childish toy and hold there is no sin but ignorance."

Francois La Rouchefoucauld, French writer (1650?-?).

An important source for Nietzsche's ideas.

Thomas Otway, English classical poet (1652-1685).

"These are rogues that pretend to be of a religion now! Well, all I say is, honest atheism for my money."

Benjamin Franklin, American statesman, scientist, writer, printer (1706-1790).

"Many a long dispute among divines may be thus abridged: It is so; It is not so. It is so; it is not so."
"The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German author (1749-1832).

Stoutly anti-Christian, but not atheist.
"This occupation with ideas of immortality is for people of rank, and especially for ladies who have nothing to do. But a man of real worth who has something to do here, and must toil and struggle to produce day by day, leaves the future world to itself, and is active and useful in this."

Percy Bysshe Shelley, English poet (1792-1822).

Thrown out of Oxford University for writing the essay, The Necessity of Atheism in 1810.
"If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced."
"It is easier to suppose that the universe has existed for all eternity than to conceive a being beyond its limits capable of creating it."

Edgar Allan Poe, American writer (1809-1849).

"No man who ever lived knows any more about the hereafter ... than you and I; and all religion ... is simply evolved out of chicanery, fear, greed, imagination and poetry."
"The idea of God, infinity, or spirit stands for the possible attempt at an impossible conception."

Marion Evans "George Eliot", English novelist (1819-1880).

"The old religion said 'Heaven help us!' Our new one, from its very lack of that faith in a heaven, will teach us all the more to help one another"

Walt Whitman, American poet (1819-1892).

Walt reportedly said, "God is a mean-spirited, pugnacious bully bent on revenge against His children for failing to live up to his impossible standards.$quot; Does this mean he believed this mean-spirited bully didn't really exist? I'm not sure.

Samuel Clemens "Mark Twain", American author and humorist (1835-1910).

"Faith is believing what you know ain't so."
"'In God We Trust.' I don't believe it would sound any better if it were true."
"It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand."
"Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain of."
"There is no other life; life itself is only a vision and a dream for nothing exists but space and you. If there was an all-powerful God, he would have made all good, and no bad." [Mark Twain in Eruption]
"Our Bible reveals to us the character of our god with minute and remorseless exactness... It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light and leading by contrast" [Reflections on Religion, 1906]
"O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it . . ." ["The War Prayer"]
"[The Bible is] a mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology." ["Mark Twain and the Bible"]
"Man is a marvelous curiosity . . . he thinks he is the Creator's pet . . . he even believes the Creator loves him; has a passion for him; sits up nights to admire him; yes and watch over him and keep him out of trouble. He prays to him and thinks He listens. Isn't it a quaint idea." [Letters from the Earth]
"If there is a God, he is a malign thug."
Mr. Clemens was once asked whether he feared death. He said that he did not, in view of the fact that he had been dead for billions and billions of years before he was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

Thomas Hardy, English author (1840-1928).

Poem Christmas 1924: "After two thousand years of mass, we've got as far as poison gas"

Herbert George "H.G." Wells, English author (1866-1946).

"It runs through the entire Christian story, and our case against the Catholic Church is that, albeit it originated in a passionate assertion of the conception of brotherly equality, it relapsed steadily from the broad nobility of its beginnings and passed over at last almost completely to the side of persecution and the pleasures of cruelty." [From Wells' book Crux Ansata - An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church 1944, reprinted in 1981 by American Atheist Press.]

Marcel Proust, French author (1871-1922).

Proust was once asked by his maid, Celeste Albaret, whether or not he thought there was a God. He replied that he did not know. Monsieur Proust: A Memoir by Celeste Albaret.
Evidently an agnostic, Proust had this to say about atheism: "The atheist forgets that what he is affirming is, precisely, a negation." (In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust)

Joyce rejected Catholicism and indeed all religion when he was a young man (as portrayed in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). He considered Catholicism to be "black magic", and deplored its anti-individuality. "For me there is ony one alternative to scholasticism, scepticism." He also rejected the church's moralizing, etc. etc.
"He comes into the world God knows how, walks on the water, gets out of his grave and goes up off the Hill of Howth. What drivel is this?"
"I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul."

Virginia Woolf, English author (1882-1941).

Robert Frost, American poet (1874-1963).

DH Lawrence, British writer (1885-1930).

"God is only a great imaginative experience."
"Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup." -Etruscan Places

Pearl S. Buck, American author (1892-1973).

"I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings."
"I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and the angels. I have enough for this life." [Treasury of Women's Quotations]

Aldous Huxley, British writer (1894-1963).

"You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough."
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell." -Point Counter Point

Ernest Hemingway, American author (1899-1961).

"All thinking men are atheists." [A Farewell to Arms]
On page 144 of Paul Johnson's book Intellectuals, it states that despite being raised in a strict Congregationalist houshold, Ernest "did not only not believe in God but regarded organized religion as a menace to human happiness", "seems to have been devoid of the religious spirit", and "ceased to practise religion at the earliest possible moment."
Other's have pointed out to me that Hemingway used the non-existence of God as a theme in his books.

Albert Camus, French author (1913-60).

Preached a heroic atheism. People should reject God defiantly in order to pour out all their loving solicitude upon mankind. [A History of God]

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John Lennon, British musician (1940-1980).

Lennon rejected religion and dogma, but he was not really an atheist - he espoused a sort of vague spirituality. I resisted adding him to the list for years, but his name was repeatedly submitted by contributors, along with the opening lyrics to "Imagine,"
Imagine there's no heaven,
It's easy if you try,
No hell below us,
Above us only sky,
Imagine all the people
living for today
. . .
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
No religion too

From the song, "God,"
God is a concept
By which we measure
Our pain
I don't believe in magic
I don't believe in I-Ching
I don't believe in Bible
I don't believe in Tarot
I don't believe in Hitler
I don't believe in Jesus

And, from the song, "I Found Out,"
There ain't no Jesus gonna come from the sky
Now that I found out I know I can cry
I found out!

Frank Zappa, American musician (1940-1993).

"Who you jivin' with that cosmic debris?"
"Reality is what it is, not what you want it to be."
"If you want to get together in any exclusive situation and have people love you, fine -- but to hang all this desperate sociology on the idea of The Cloud-Guy who has The Big Book, who knows if you've been bad or good -- and CARES about any of it -- to hang it all on that, folks, is the chimpanzee part of the brain working." [The Real Frank Zappa Book, ("Church and State" chapter) by Frank Zappa and Peter Occhiogrosso, p. 301]

Phil Ochs, American folk singer (1941-1976).

And I won't be laughing at the lies when I'm gone
And I can't question how or when or why when I'm gone
Can't live proud enough to die when I'm gone
So I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here

Barry White, American singer (1944-2003).

Referring to religion, Barry told Reuters in 1999 interview, "I don't like stories, things I can't prove."