I'm still an atheist, thank God.

Seventeen years later, Buñuel expressed a different attitude in another interview: "I'm not a Christian, but I'm not an atheist either," he says. "I'm weary of hearing that accidental old aphorism of mine "I'm not an atheist, thank God." It's outworn. Dead leaves. In 1951, I made a small film called 'Mexican Bus Ride,' about a village too poor to support a church and a priest. The place was serene, because no one suffered from guilt. It's guilt we must escape, not God." (Penelope Gilliat, "Long Live the Living!", The New Yorker, December 5, 1977, p. 54) As Aphelis notes, "There's most likely a small confusion when Buñuel quotes his own aphorism: instead of 'I'm not an atheist, thank God' — which doesn't correspond [to] what he said in 1960 — one should read 'I'm an atheist, thank God.' That's the aphorism Buñuel didn't agree with anymore in 1977." | Although the aphorism is associated with Buñuel, it did not originate with him. Samuel Butler (1835–1902) mentions in his Note-Books having heard of a man exclaiming "I am an atheist, thank God!" Even earlier, there is a rather similar aphorism by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799).