2000 Years of Disbelief (1996)
American writer James Haught’s 1996 book 2000 Years of Disbelief: Famous People with the Courage to Doubt, wherein he devotes three page sections to 66 main “disbelievers” of history, listed below, with summary and quote selections. [1]
In genius rankings, Haught disbeliever refers to American writer James Haught’s 1996 listing of the top 64 disbelievers, an admixture of either famous atheists and or famous doubters in the existence of god, over the last 2,000-years, as found in his 2000 Years of Disbelief: Famous People with the Courage to Doubt. [1] The notation (HD:#), e.g. Shakespeare (HD:4), refers to the Haught disbeliever ranking #, listed below, of the person cited.

Research
Haught’s 2000 Years of Disbelief, lists over one-thousand disbeliever related quotations, which he says he procured over the course of three decades, from scores of books, anthologies, and collections, and other sources. His main citation staples are the following:

● Buckner, Edward M. and Buckner, Michael E. (1993). Quotations That Support the Separation of Church and State. The Atlanta Freethought Society.
● Bufe, Charles Q. (1992). The Heretic's Handbook of Quotations: Cutting Comments
on Burning Issues. See Sharp Press
● Cardiff, Ira D. (1945). What Great Men Think of Religion. Arno Press, 1972.
● Gray, Carole. (1992). Atheist Desk Calendar (1993 and 1994 editions). Publisher.
Women of Freethought Calendars, Columbus, Ohio.
● Greeley, Roger E. (1988). The Best of Humanism. Prometheus Books.
● Mencken, Henry. (1966). A New Dictionary of Quotations. Alfred A. Knopf.
● Noyes, Rufus K. (1906). Views of Religion. L. K. Washburn.
● Peter, Laurence J. (1977). Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time. William
Morrow & Co.
● Seldes, George. (1960). The Great Quotations. Lyle Stuart.
● Vernon, Thomas S. (1989). Great Infidels. M&M Press.
● Wilcox, Laird and George, John. (1994). Be Reasonable: Selected Quotations for Inquiring Minds. Prometheus Books.

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List
The following is James Haught’s listing of the top 64 disbelievers, i.e. famous people with the courage to doubt, over the last 2,000-years:

Early Rationalism

1. Omar Khayyam

The Renaissance

2. Michel Montaigne
3. Christopher Marlow
4. William Shakespeare

The European Enlightenment

5. Thomas Hobbes
6. Benedict Spinoza
7. John Locke
8. Charles Montesquieu
9. Voltaire
10. David Hume
11. Denis Diderot
12. Edward Gibbon

American Rationalists

13. Benjamin Franklin
14. John Adams
15. Thomas Paine
16. Ethan Allen
17. Thomas Jefferson
18. James Madison

19th Century

19. Johann Goethe
20. Napoleon Bonaparte
21. Arthur Schopenhauer
22. Percy Shelley
23. Ralph Emerson
24. John Mill
25. Abraham Lincoln
26. Charles Darwin
27. Charles Dickens
28. Elizabeth Stanton
29. Henry Thoreau
30. George Eliot
31. Matthew Arnold
32. Thomas Huxley
33. Leo Tolstoy
34. Robert Ingersoll
35. Mark Twain
36. Charles Swinburne
37. John Burroughs
38. William James
39. Ambrose Bierce
40. Friedrich Nietzsche

Early 20th Century

41. Thomas Edison
42. Luther Burbank
43. Elbert Hubbard
44. Sigmund Freud
45. Bernard Shaw
46. Clarence Darrow
47. Francisco Ferrer
48. John Dewey
49. George Santayana
50. William Du Bois
51. Bertrand Russell
52. Albert Einstein
53. Henry Mencken

Mid and Late 20th Century

54. Margaret Sanger
55. Will Durant
56. Walter Lippmann
57. Langston Hughes
58. Ayn Rand
59. Jean-Paul Sartre
60. Alfred Ayer
61. Isaac Asimov
62. Gene Roddenberry
63. Steve Allen
64. Kurt Vonnegut

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See also
Atheism timeline

References
1. (a) Haught, James A. (1996). 2000 Years of Disbelief: Famous People with the Courage to Doubt. Prometheus.
(b) James A. Haught (publications) – Wvinter.net.
(c) James A. Haught (about) – UUHumanistSymposium.com.

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