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Rufus V Weaver

Everywhere all who cherish religious liberty should break through every hindering barrier to unite in the support of this common cause.
-- Rufus V Weaver, Champions of Religious Liberty, 1947, p. 12, quoted from Albert J Menendez and Edd Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom

Daniel Webster (1782-1852)
American lawyer and statesman

All creeds are fallible and uncertain evidences of evangelical piety.
-- Daniel Webster, from Rufus K Noyes, Views of Religion, quoted from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.
-- Daniel Webster (attributed: source unknown)

Sarah Weddington
Attorney in Roe v Wade

The violence of some anti-abortionists was an ongoing problem. On October 10, 1985, security was tightened at the Supreme Court after Justice Blackmun received a death threat; the day before, an anti-abortion protester had disrupted court proceedings. Anyone who has ever attended a Supreme Court hearing knows one doesn't even whisper, much less interrupt the Court. On December 4, the FBI released figures on terrorism, but these did not include data on abortion clinic bombings, as they were supposedly not attributable to organized groups. Abortion clinics were increasingly the targets of acts of vandalism, death threats to employees, telephoned bomb threats, and other forms of harassment. On Christmas Day, three clinics were bombed in Pensacola, Florida, and on New Year's Day, 1986, a Washington, DC, clinic was bombed. The Christmas bomber, who was later arrested, said his actions had been a Christmas present for Jesus.
-- Sarah Weddington, attorney in Roe v Wade, in her book, A Question of Choice (1992), p.206

Sen. Lowell Weicker (b. 1931)
Third-party Connecticut governor, known for his maverick style, he took on the Nixon White House as a Republican Senator

The United States is not a Christian nation. It is a great nation with Christians, among others, in it. But our greatness is based on the fact that there is no official religion.
-- Lowell Weicker, (attributed: source unknown)

That wall, embodied in the First Amendment, is perhaps America's most important contribution to political progress on this planet.
-- Lowell Weicker, Free Inquiry (Summer 1983), quoted from Albert J Menendez and Edd Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom

The time has come to knock off this religion business in American politics. There's no end to the mischief that can occur. It is like putting nitroglycerine in a Waring blender.
-- Lowell Weicker, Remarks, August 1984, quoted from Albert J Menendez and Edd Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom

Steven Weinberg
Physicist and Nobel Laureate

     • Check our Big List of Steven Weinberg Quotations

Even though their arguments did not invoke religion, I think we all know what's behind these arguments. They're trying to protect religious beliefs from contradiction by science. They used to do it by prohibiting teachers from teaching evolution at all; then they wanted to teach intelligent design as an alternative theory; now they want the supposed "weaknesses" in evolution pointed out. But it's all the same program -- it's all an attempt to let religious ideas determine what is taught in science courses.
-- Steven Weinberg, discussing the motives of proponents of intelligent design during a September, 2003, State Board of Education hearing, from Michael King, "In Search of Intelligent Life at the SBOE (State Board of Education)" (Austin, [Texas], Chronicle: September 19, 2003), quoted from (and citation notes derived from) The Texas Freedom Network, "TFN Clips" (September 19, 2003)

If there is a God that has special plans for humans, then He has taken very great pains to hide His concern for us. To me it would seem impolite if not impious to bother such a God with our prayers.
-- Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory

Premature as the question may be, it is hardly possible not to wonder whether we will find any answer to our deepest questions, any signs of the workings of an interested God, in a final theory. I think that we will not.
-- Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory

Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things -- that takes religion.
-- Steven Weinberg, in a dialog on religion with other scientists, 1999, quoted from "The Constitution Guarantees Freedom From Religion" an open letter to US Vice-Presidential candidate Senator Joseph Lieberman, issued by the Freedom From Religion Foundation on August 28, 2000

Most scientists I know don't care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists.
-- Steven Weinberg, quoted in Natalie Angier, "Confessions of a Lonely Atheist," New York Times Magazine, January 14, 2001

Science should be taught not in order to support religion and not in order to destroy religion. Science should be taught simply ignoring religion.
-- Steven Weinberg, Freethought Today, April, 2000

Though aware that there is nothing in the universe that suggests any purpose for humanity, one way that we can find a purpose is to study the universe by the methods of science, without consoling ourselves with fairy tales about its future, or about our own.
-- Steven Weinberg, in an article in The New York Review of Books, quoted in Dennis Overbye, "The Universe Might Last Forever, Astronomers Say, but Life Might Not" (January 1, 2002), The New York Times

It seems a bit unfair to my relatives to be murdered in order to provide an opportunity for free will for Germans, but even putting that aside, how does free will account for cancer? Is it an opportunity of free will for tumors?
     I don't need to argue here that the evil in the world proves that the universe is not designed, but only that there are no signs of benevolence that might have shown the hand of a designer. But in fact the perception that God cannot be benevolent is very old. Plays by Aeschylus and Euripides make a quite explicit statement that the gods are selfish and cruel, though they expect better behavior from humans. God in the Old Testament tells us to bash the heads of infidels and demands of us that we be willing to sacrifice our children's lives at His orders, and the God of traditional Christianity and Islam damns us for eternity if we do not worship him in the right manner. Is this a nice way to behave? I know, I know, we are not supposed to judge God according to human standards, but you see the problem here: If we are not yet convinced of His existence, and are looking for signs of His benevolence, then what other standards can we use?
-- Steven Weinberg, "A Designer Universe?"

Victor Frederick Weisskopf (b. 1908)
Austrian physicist

In a Jewish theological seminar there was an hours-long discussion about proofs of the existence of God. After some hours, one rabbi got up and said, "God is so great, he does not even need to exist."
-- Victor Weisskopf (attributed: source unknown)

Herbert George Wells (1866-1946)
British author

Biologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since the beginning.
-- H G Wells, A Modern Utopia, ch. 3, sct. 4 (1905; repr. in The Works of H G Wells, vol. 9, 1925), quoted from The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations

Moral indignation -- jealousy with a halo.
-- H G Wells (attributed: source unknown)

I do not believe I have any immortality. The greatest evil in the world today is the Christian religion.
-- H G Wells (attributed: source unknown)

I was indeed a prodigy of Early Impiety.... There was a time when I believed in the story and the scheme of salvation, so far as I could understand it, just as there was a time when I believed there was a Devil.... Suddenly the broke through to me and I knew this God was a lie.... I sensed it was a silly story long before I dared to admit even to myself that it was a silly story. For indeed it is a silly story, and each generation nowadays swallows it with greater difficulty.... Why do people go on pretending about this Christianity?
-- H G Wells, from Ira D Cardiff, What Great Men Think of Religion, quoted from James A Haught, 2000 Years of Disbelief

I think that it stands for everything most hostile to the mental emancipation and stimulation of mankind. It is the completest, most highly organized system of prejudices and antagonism in existence. Everywhere in the world there are ignorance and prejudice, but the greatest complex of these, with the most extensive prestige and the most intimate entanglement with traditional institutions, is the Roman Catholic Church. It presents many faces to the world, but everywhere it is systematic in its fight against freedom.
-- H G Wells (attributed: source unknown)

Indeed Christianity passes. Passes -- it has gone! It has littered the beaches of life with churches, cathedrals, shrines and crucifixes, prejudices and intolerances, like the sea urchin and starfish and empty shells and lumps of stinging jelly upon the sands here after a tide. A tidal wave out of Egypt. And it has left a multitude of little wriggling theologians and confessors and apologists hopping and burrowing in the warm nutritious sand. But in the hearts of living men, what remains of it now? Doubtful scraps of Arianism. Phrases. Sentiments. Habits.
-- H G Wells, from Ira D Cardiff, What Great Men Think of Religion, quoted from James A Haught, 2000 Years of Disbelief

There's lots will take things as they are -- fat and stupid; and lots will be worried by a sort of feeling that it's all wrong, and that they ought to be doing something. Now whenever things are that a lot of people feel they ought to be doing something, the weak, and those who go weak with a lot of complicated thinking, always make for a sort of do-nothing religion, very pious and superior, and submit to persecution and the will of the Lord. Very likely you've seen the same thing. It's energy in a gale of funk, and turned clean inside out. These cages will be full of psalms and hymns and piety. And those of a less simple sort will work in a bit of -- what is it? -- eroticism.
-- H G Wells, War of the Worlds

Wells probably didn't say this:

"As with the Christian religion, the worst argument for socialism is its adherents."
-- Unverified. This very same quip is fully documented as having been written by George Orwell; if Wells did say this, we cannot find any verification. Positive Atheism apologizes for any inconvenience our previous listing of this as a Wells quotation may have caused anybody.

Rev Dr. Richard B Westbrook
Author of The Eliminator and The Bible: Whence and What? (1890)

The New Testament description of the crucifixion and the attending circumstances, even to the earthquake and darkness, was thus anticipated by five centuries.
-- Richard B Westbrook, The Bible: Whence and What?, quoted from John E Remsberg, The Christ, p. 396, on comparing the myth of the crucifixion of Christ with the Greek myth called "Prometheus Bound"

It is well known that the Athenians celebrated the allegorical giving of the flesh to eat of Ceres, the goddess of corn, and in like manner the giving his blood to drink by Bacchus, the god of wine.
-- Richard B Westbrook, quoted from John E Remsberg, The Christ, p. 402, comparing the rituals of the Christ myth with the mysteries associated with the worship of the Roman god Bacchus

Bishop Brooke Foss Westcott (1825-1901)
From 1870 to 1890, regius professor of divinity at Cambridge; with F J A Hort, published The New Testament in the Original Greek (1881)

The essence of Christianity lies in a miracle; and if it can be shown that a miracle is either impossible or incredible, all further inquiry into the details of its history is superfluous.
-- B F Westcott, Gospel of the Resurrection, p. 34, from John E Remsberg, The Christ (1909)

It is impossible to pass from the Synoptic Gospels to that of St John without feeling that the transition involves the passage from one world of thought to another. No familiarity with the general teaching of the Gospels, no wide conception of the character of the Savior, is sufficient to destroy the contrast which exists in form and spirit between the earlier and later narratives.
-- B F Westcott, Introduction to Study of Gospels, p. 249, from John E Remsberg, The Christ (1909)

Edward Alexander Westermarck (1862-1939)
Finnish anthropologist

Increasing knowledge lessens the sphere of the supernatural.
-- Edward A Westermarck, assuming, unfortunately, that the knowledge involved is that of true science rather than that of pseudoscience, in The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906)

Could it be brought home to people that there is no absolute standard in morality, they would perhaps be somewhat more tolerant in their judgments, and more apt to listen to the voice of reason.
-- Edward A Westermarck, not even considering the slanderous notion that humans, without terse commandments from a (specific) totem-god, immediately lapse into debauchery and merderous lawlessness, in The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), thanks to Laird Wilcox, ed, "The Degeneration of Belief"

Allen Wheelis (b. 1915)
American psychoanalyst

Clearly it is not reason that has failed. What has failed -- as it has always failed -- is the attempt to achieve certainty, to reach an absolute, to find the course of human events to a final end.....It is not reason that has promised to eliminate risk in human undertakings; it is the emotional needs of men.
-- Allen Wheelis, The Quest For Identity (1958), thanks to Laird Wilcox, ed, "The Degeneration of Belief"

The world is full of danger and opportunity. The strong adapt by changing the world, the weak by changing themselves. The weak look inward at desires, outward at possibilities of gratification, measure the danger, find the risk to be high, and try to bring things in line by reducing their needs. The unafraid leap into the fray, seize such power as they can, move things around, rearrange the world to fit their needs.
     The guises of power are so various, so dissembled that power ceases to be recognized as such. We would have it that human life is discontinuous with life in the tide pools, in the jungle, that mind or spirit, something far removed from power, has come to be the essence of human life. We delude ourselves. The holders of great power may be physically frail, gentle in manner, tender in sentiment, Christian by profession, may wear but a loincloth; but power is power, and its nature is to grab hold, to seize possession, to overwhelm. Whatever appears in human life that seems unrelated to power. or even -- like love, like charity, like self-sacrifice -- contrary to it, is, if it endures, but another mask of power.
     And true knowledge, science would have us believe that such accuracy, leading to certainty, is the only criterion of knowledge, would make the trial of Galileo the paradigm of the two points of view which aspire to truth. would suggest, that is, that the cardinals represent only superstition and repression, while Galileo represents freedom
     But there is another criterion which is systematically neglected in this elevation of science. Man does not now -- and will not ever -- live by the bread of scientific method alone. He must deal with life and death, with love and cruelty and despair, and so must make conjectures of great importance which may or may not be true and which do not lend themselves to experimentation. It is better to give than to receive, Love thy neighbor as thyself, Better to risk slavery through non-violence than to defend freedom with murder. We must deal with such propositions, must decide whether they are true. whether to believe them, whether to act on them -- and scientific method is no help for by their nature these matters lie forever beyond the realm of science.
-- Allen Wheelis, The Path Not Taken

One can often recognize herd animals by their tendency to carry bibles.
-- Allen Wheelis, The Signal

Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918)
American educator and diplomat who founded Cornell University with Ezra Cornell and was its first president (1868-1885)

The cardinal doctrine of a fanatic's creed is that his enemies are the enemies of God.
-- Andrew Dickson White, The History of the Warfare of Science With Theology in Christendom (1898), vol. II, ch. xvi, p. 149

Here we may pause for a moment to note one of the chief differences between scientific and theological reasoning considered in themselves. Kepler's main reasoning as to the existence of a law for cometary movement was right; but his secondary reasoning, that comets move nearly in straight lines, was wrong. His right reasoning was developed by Gassendi in France, by Borelli in Italy, by Hevel and Doerfel in Germany, by Eysat and Bernouilli in Switzerland, by Percy and -- most important of all, as regards mathematical demonstration -- by Newton in England. The general theory, which was true, they accepted and developed; the secondary theory, which was found untrue, they rejected; and, as a result, both of what they thus accepted and of what they rejected, was evolved the basis of the whole modern cometary theory.
     Very different was this from the theological method. As a rule, when there arises a thinker as great in theology as Kepler in science, the whole mass of his conclusions ripens into a dogma. His disciples labour not to test it, but to establish it; and while, in the Catholic Church, it becomes a dogma to be believed or disbelieved under the penalty of damnation, it becomes in the Protestant Church the basis for one more sect.
-- Andrew Dickson White, The History of the Warfare of Science With Theology in Christendom (1898), vol. I, ch. iv, pp. 202-3

Ida White

Christianity exceeds all other faiths in its power to deform and finally invert the mental process.
-- Ida White (attributed: source unknown)

Ralph K White
American psychologist; propaganda analyst

An ideology ... gives significance to the lives of individuals who might otherwise be overwhelmed by a sense of purposelessness and insignificance. Usually some kind of black-and-white picture is an inherent part of the ideology, and gives meaning to the struggle between the good guys and the bad guys.
-- Ralph K White, Nobody Wanted War: Nobody Wanted War: Misperception in Vietnam and Other Wars (1968), thanks to Laird Wilcox, ed, "The Degeneration of Belief"

William Allen White (1868-1944)
American newspaper editor

Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others.
-- William Allen White, stolen from the Boy Scouts of America Quotes Engine (which is, by the way, dominated by quotations from skeptics and freethinkers)

Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)
British-American mathematician and philosopher

Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.
-- Alfred North Whitehead (attributed: source unknown)

I consider Christianity to be one of the great disasters of the human race.... It would be impossible to imagine anything more un-Christianlike than theology.
-- Alfred North Whitehead, from Lawrence J Peter, Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time, quoted from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death.
-- Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures in Ideas (1933), Encarta Book of Quotations (1999)

The total absence of humour in the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
-- Alfred North Whitehead (attributed: source unknown)

Katherine Whitehorn (b. 1926)
British journalist and writer; columnist, The Observer in London

Why do born-again people so often make you wish they'd never been born the first time?
-- Katherine Whitehorn, The Observer (London) (May 20, 1979), quoted from Encarta Book of Quotations (1999)

It is not just a matter of some women getting into the mainstream, but of shifting its very course; with the realization that if it leaves out half the human race it cannot be as main as all that.
-- Katherine Whitehorn (1990)

Cedric Hubbell Whitman
American poet, classicist

Mythology is what grownups believe, folklore is what they tell children and religion is both.
-- Cedric Whitman (1969), quoted from Jonathon Green, The Cassell Dictionary of Insulting Quotations

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
American poet whose great work Leaves of Grass (first published 1855), written in unconventional meter and rhyme, celebrates the self, death as a process of life, universal brotherhood, and the greatness of democracy and the United States

Pointing to another world will never stop vice among us; shedding light over this world can alone help us.
-- Walt Whitman, from Ira D Cardiff, What Great Men Think of Religion, quoted from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the world -- a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious, surely never again to set. But against it, deeply entrench'd, holding possession, yet remains (not only through the churches and schools, but by imaginative literature, and unregenerate poetry) the fossil theology of the mythic-materialistic, superstitious, untaught and credulous fable-loving, primitive ages of humanity.
-- Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas, (1870), quoted from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

There is no god more divine than yourself.
-- Walt Whitman, from Rufus K Noyes, Views of Religion, quoted from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is.
-- Walt Whitman "Song of Myself"

I think I could turn and live with animals,
They are so placid and self-contained,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.
-- Walt Whitman "Song of Myself"

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God.
-- Walt Whitman (attributed: source unknown)

I think I could turn and live with animals
They are so placid and self-contain'd ...
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.
    -- Walt Whitman, from Ira D Cardiff, What Great Men Think of Religion, quoted from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

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