J. Reuben Clark, Jr.

J. Reuben Clark, Jr.

First Counselor in the First Presidency (June 12, 1959 – October 6, 1961)

Second Counselor in the First Presidency (April 9, 1951 – June 12, 1959)

Quorum of the Twelve Apostles (October 11, 1934 – October 6, 1961)

First Counselor in the First Presidency (October 6, 1934 – April 4, 1951)

Second Counselor in the First Presidency (April 6, 1933 – October 6, 1934)

General Conference Addresses

October 1960 General Conference
- I am the Life, the Light, the Way, and the Truth; and the Law
  - “Someday, as a beginning to your transgression, you may have to determine whether a cigarette is worth more than what the Lord promised; someday, you will have to make the same determination about a drink of whiskey; someday, you may have to determine whether you prefer what the Lord has promised to an illicit date. You who have been through the temple of Almighty God, know your covenants, your obligations. Never forget them. Keep the commandments of the Lord.”
  - “The Lord never condemns the individual, except on rare occasions. He condemns the sin.”
  - “Let us try always to learn what the Lord wants. If we are living the kind of lives we should live, that I hope we do live, we will find that no question ever arises in our minds for determination as to whether or not we should do a good deed, take a good course. The question comes only when we are thinking of doing something we should not do.”
April 1960 General Conference
- The Power of Faith
  - “As I think about faith, this principle of power, I am obliged to believe that it is an intelligent force. Of what kind, I do not know. But it is superior to and overrules all other forces of which we know. It is the principle, the force, by which the dead are restored to life.”
  - “I think that we should never administer to the sick, we should never pray, particularly when we pray for specific things, that we do not repeat and present to the Lord, even as Christ prayed in the Garden, “Nevertheless, not my will, but thine, be done.””
- All Roads Lead to Rome
  - “There are not many roads that lead to heaven. There is one and one only, and that is the road that we profess to travel and should be traveled. It is the road that is restored to us by the restoration of the gospel and the restoration of the priesthood.”
  - “Beware of the idea that you do not have to live the gospel in order to obtain the salvation and exaltation that are promised—not because God has imposed a penalty for your failure, but because, as I have already expressed to you at one time or another, I believe that the spirit grows or shrinks, as it is here in this mortal body, as it was intended that it should. I believe that bad acts, bad thoughts, inaccurate beliefs do not develop the spirit; but on the contrary, they may retard or dwarf it.”
October 1959 General Conference
- The Task Ahead
  - “There are good people in Russia. There are faithful people in Russia. Elder Benson has recently met a few of them. But they live under this Marxian theory, and one of the elements of that is the destruction of free agency which was given to the sons of God before the world was created. Through it there was the rebellion in heaven. Through free agency we climb to the heights that lead us into exaltation. The Marxian theology repudiates God.”
- The One Road
  - “There is a saying that “all roads lead to Rome.” As Brother Christiansen pointed out today and made suggestions, too many of us seem sometimes to offer this excuse or that excuse or the other excuse for not obeying the commandments of the Lord because we will all go to the same place, and we know that that view is held by many of the sectarian churches of the world. That, so far as this Priesthood is concerned, is not true, it is an apostate principle.”
  - “Brethren, if you face a situation where there is no nursing available, no doctors available, only the Priesthood, are you going to be living so that you can go and in the name of Jesus Christ, bless and heal?”
April 1959 General Conference
- The Resurrected Christ Appears
  - “The Lord is good to us. He is giving us direction if we will take it. I urge you to bring your thoughts back, as I did last night, from space, about which we know nothing in comparison with what there is to know—and fix our minds upon the great powers and authorities which we have as members of the priesthood, representing our Heavenly Father, endowed with a portion of his authority to work out his purposes, not ours.”
- Living the Gospel
  - “We must keep his commandments, for if and when he leaves us, as he will if we do not live as we should, we shall for the time being lose our power, lose our usefulness, lose our enthusiasm, lose all that we ought to have in order to go forward, and it will take some time after we have found out our mistakes and our errors to get back into the work.”
  - “We do not need any expensive equipment in order to live righteously, in order to have within our reach under the inspiration and power of the Lord the greatest force, the greatest authority of which God has ever made us aware.”
October 1958 General Conference
- Let Us Pray Always
  - “We do not pray, should not pray for the bad, the unwholesome things of this earth.”
  - “I have a feeling that we should make praying a habit. I am not speaking of morning and evening prayers only. I feel that we should pray whenever we need prayer, and whenever we need the help of our Heavenly Father, and that is most of our lives.”
- The Persecutions of the Saints
  - “Be careful, be prayerful, be wise, when you undertake to make your reproof, when you undertake to direct men who have nothing but their love of the Gospel and their respect of you to impel them to obey you. Be careful of their feelings. Speak kindly and in such a way that there never will be any question as to your love for them and your desire merely to be helpful.”
April 1958 General Conference
- The Way, the Truth and the Light
  - “When the time comes for passing judgment, that great principle not to condemn the world, but to save it, will be fully operative and that for every good deed we have done, we shall receive the full reward that it is possible to bestow under the rules and laws governing, and having in mind justice. And I have the further feeling that for every ill thing we do there will be imposed upon us the least penalty that may properly be bestowed, having in mind the principles involved—eternal justice seasoned by mercy and love.”
- Be Not Dismayed
  - “We are living in perilous times. That is trite. Man has discovered and is trying to learn how to use some of the great forces that evidently were operative at the time of the creation of the universe. We know nothing about them, we play with them as a child plays with the live end of a high voltage transmission wire. We know not how to control them nor what they will do.”
  - “We are equally challenged in all walks of life, economic, financial, social, religious, with new theories, new problems, new solutions. We live in a maze of unknown, untried ideas and concepts. Be not dismayed.”
  - “Remember, you who may be influenced by discoveries of science today, that the discoveries of science in my day have been thrown away and given up and in so far as present discoveries are not in accord with truth, they will be thrown away and discarded.”
April 1957 General Conference
- The Constitution
  - “When God puts his hand to the plow, his furrow is deep and straight, clear to the end. God gave us the heritage; ours is the duty to cherish and protect it.”
  - “God never planted his Spirit, his truth, in the hearts of men from the point of a bayonet.”
- The Law of Chastity
  - “Sometimes our faith waits on our presumed knowledge. I hope and I pray that we can bring into our hearts, into our souls the simple principles of the Gospel. Why should we worry about the things that the Lord has not made clear. Why should we worry about the things that he has not revealed, usually relating as they do, to matters that are not of much importance in the way we live. Why not put all extraneous things out of our minds as affecting our faith and just believe not only but come to know the power of faith and what it can do for us.”
  - “I would like ourselves, the Priesthood, and our youth to understand that sex transgression is tragically serious, not something to be lightly considered.”
  - “It is our duty, each and every one of us, to do all that we possibly can do to restrain our brethren and our sisters, and particularly our young people from committing themselves as some are doing. There is no happiness in it for them here or hereafter. There is grief and sorrow and regret. There usually is an effort to repent but repentance brings an agony of spirit.”
  - “It is no light thing to transgress sexually; it is a tragedy.”
October 1956 General Conference
- Spiritual Relativity
  - “In that great body of intelligences there were those whom the Lord has described as “noble and great ones”: obviously others were not noble and great.”
  - “There never was a time when all spirits were equal, so far as the Lord has revealed; so far as he has revealed, there never will be a time when all spirits are equal.”
- “Go Ye Not after Them”
  - “My whole soul rebels against this emasculation of Christianity. Jesus did live. First, there was the great plan in heaven; that did actually occur. All that we know about it took place there. There was the plan; the earth was formed; Adam came; the human family followed. We came here to prove ourselves. Finally, Christ was born in the Meridian of Time. He lived. He taught. He gave instructions. He was crucified. Then on the morning of the third day, he was resurrected, thus bringing to each and every of us the blessings of the resurrection. We all shall be resurrected. All of that has gone for these people to whom I refer. It is myth, tradition, allegory. Be not deceived by them; believe them not; follow not after them.”
April 1956 General Conference
- Lowliness of Jesus Christ
  - “His gospel can be lived, can be enjoyed by the poorest of us; the poorest of us may enjoy the blessings of the gospel, the blessings of the priesthood which accompany it. We need neither worldly position nor wealth in order to enjoy all that he has to give. His is the salvation and exaltation if we follow him, of all of us. There is nothing requiring more than a broken heart and a contrite spirit, and all that flows therefrom.”
- The First Vision
  - “Without the First Vision and all that flows from it, this Church as we know it, would never have been built, would not now exist, and would have been but a memory.”
October 1955 General Conference
- by the Name of Jesus Christ
  - “We must stand adamant for the doctrine of the atonement of Jesus the Christ, for the divinity of his conception, for his sinless life, and for, shall I say, the divinity of his death, his voluntary surrender of life. He was not killed; he gave up his life.”
  - “We must never permit to enter into our thoughts and certainly not into our teachings, the idea that he was merely a great teacher, a great philosopher, the builder of a great system of ethics. It is our duty, day after day, year in and year out, always to declare that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ who brought redemption to the world and to all the inhabitants thereof.”
- Live Up to the Priesthood We Bear
  - “Our culture is manifested in our public speaking. Our culture is manifested in the training which our young people have and which they demonstrate, as it is reported to us, to the astonishment of the leaders of the Army and of the Navy. We have a culture in art. This people of ours is a highly cultured people. We have a few rough edges to grind down, but our courtesy, our kindness, our affection one for the other, passes far beyond that which is found among other peoples.”
  - “Help us so to live that we may enjoy those powers and exercise them, and then we shall rear our families as they should be reared. We will heal them when they are sick. We will be protected from harm and accident and disease. We will have more happiness than any of us can now imagine, all subject to the will of the Lord.”
April 1955 General Conference
- Nothing that is Useless
  - “The Lord has given us nothing that is useless or unnecessary. He has filled the Scriptures with the things which we should do in order that we may gain salvation.”
  - “When we partake of the Sacrament we covenant to obey and keep his commandments. There are no exceptions. There are no distinctions, no differences.”
- “What Is Man—” He Still Stands as God Made Him
  - “It is my faith, and I believe history will bear me out, that there never has been a time in the history of the world, in the darkest hours of paganism when men did not have in their possession so much of the truth, and more, as they were able to live. Sometimes that truth was besmirched, sometimes it was dimmed, sometimes it was distorted, but down underneath it all always were some elemental truths, because men had in their minds at least the traditions of the gospel preached from the beginning, had in their minds certain fundamental things which concerned their salvation.”
  - “We are not moving blindly, we are not moving by the maxims of the past only. We are not moving alone, guided only by the revelations given in ancient times. We are moving forward under revelations given in modern times and are moving forward under a knowledge that if we need further light, it shall be given to us.”
October 1954 General Conference
- Our Priceless Special Blessings
  - “There are, now, wolves in the sheepfold disguised as sheep. Against them and against their teachings we must all be fighting affirmatively for the truths of the gospel.”
  - “Faith is not trust, faith is a living, and I think an intelligent, force, which God himself performs his great work.”
- The Army of the Lord
  - “We are to fight evil, we are to fight the foes of righteousness, we are to fight a life and death struggle for ourselves, not only, but for those who are associated with us.”
  - “Do not cross over the line into the camp of the enemy, and beware of those who cross the line from your enemy and come into your ranks. They may be all right, but many and many a man, I think that is not an exaggeration, is coming over to us from the camp of the enemy. We welcome him and take him in, and he turns out to be a spy, one who is seeking to destroy us. Be on your guard.”
  - “The man who is unchaste has wet powder. The man who is guilty of that filthy crime of homosexuality, has wet powder. The man who cheats his neighbor, his powder is not dry. The man who blasphemes, his powder is not dry. So the man who lies, and steals. Somewhat so the man who is selfish, who is unkind, who is uncharitable. So is the man who does not do his duty in the great Army, who does not stand guard to keep out the enemy, the man who does not live so that the Lord can give him inspiration and revelation according to his needs.”
April 1954 General Conference
- Power in Unity
  - “I believe that there are no real punishments except those which we bring upon ourselves. The felon in the penitentiary cell has punished himself by his course of action which has taken away from him a blessing with which God endowed him, namely, his freedom.”
  - “The Lord does not need to punish, we punish ourselves, we deprive ourselves of the blessings which the Lord promised us.”
  - “We shall never, brethren, get to the place that the Lord expects us to go and marked out for us to get to, save we shall work together in unison. We cannot each one go out by himself, along his own lines, live his own life, so to speak, and have this Church reach the destiny which it will reach if we do cooperate.”
  - “Every man living as he should, cooperating as he should, brings into the ward or into the quorum a power against evil that cannot be attained in any other way.”
- “Our Bible”
  - “This may be the final verdict where there is not too much concern over Arian doctrines denying Godhood to Jesus, and other erroneous doctrines, but to the Latter-day Saint, the final verdict must be that no text that minimizes or denies the Godhood of Jesus, can be regarded as the word of God, no matter how old and respected the manuscript may be which sets out such views.”
  - “To the Latter-day Saint, Jesus was the Christ, the Only Begotten, the Son of God, a member of the Trinity. All our modern Scriptures are to this point, and the true ancient scriptures will neither take away from, nor destroy this everlasting truth.”
- Jesus: Our Risen Lord
  - “This Church of ours accepts all the foregoing as the literal facts pertaining to the resurrection; none is symbolism, none is allegory. These things are the warp and the woof of the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ. They admit of no questioning, amongst us they are not questioned. That they are true is our testimony to the world.”
October 1953 General Conference
- Our Great Responsibilities
  - “Satan—I can understand that his proposal was based upon the proposition that since the Father was the Father of all his children and loved them, nothing could be more satisfactory to the Father than the promise to redeem them all. It was a subtle approach, and, of course, God saw it. Satan was “cast down.””
  - “Obedience in spiritual matters requires that on occasion it shall be blind obedience because the Lord cannot explain to us all the things that he asks us to do. We could not understand.”
  - “If we think of this carefully, I am sure we cannot approach our work in the Church with lightmindedness. I am sure we shall have to be a prayerful people. I am sure we shall have to live in accordance with the commandments which he has given. I am sure we must use our utmost endeavors to build up the kingdom of God here on earth.”
- Unity in Righteousness
  - “No one can estimate the power and the influence that we might wield, no one can estimate the amount of good we might do if we were united, and no one can estimate the amount of good we are not doing, because we are not united as we should be, united in faith, united in action, believing the same things, supporting our leaders, ward. stake. Priesthood, and all the rest. What we could do if we would but exercise the powers of the Priesthood which we have.”
  - “Deal gently, deal kindly, deal understandingly, deal justly, deal with charity, deal with love, with your sons and your daughters, and your wives.”
April 1953 General Conference
- Faith and Priesthood
  - “I take it that we can all glimpse something of the nature and the power of this Priesthood, which each of us has. With the possession of that power, there comes a tremendous responsibility, so great indeed, that to contemplate it seriously, is almost to crush us.”
  - “Have simple faith, for faith is the implementing force of the Priesthood.”
- None Other Name Under Heaven
  - “We know, and it is our responsibility to carry forward what we do know, that Jesus is the Christ, that he is the Son of God, that he was in truth an atoning sacrifice for the fall, that through him and by him all mortals, whoever they are, will be resurrected, that through his gospel and by it, all may be saved, not only, but exalted in the kingdom of God.”
  - “Ours is the responsibility to see to it that no act or thought or teaching of ours shall in any way question the divinity of Jesus, nor in any way question that he was the Son of God, nor in any way question the atoning sacrifice which he made for us. If we do, we shall become guilty of that great offense where we shall crucify to ourselves the Son of God afresh for which I am sure we shall hardly gain forgiveness.”
October 1952 General Conference
- Pray Always—Repentant, and with Faith
  - “We should always pray with an open mind, asking the Lord to bestow the blessings upon us in his wisdom. We should not pray and ask the Lord to give us what we ourselves, want, and importune him to that effect, except all subject to his will.”
- Put Yourself in Order
  - “Do not put off putting yourself in order, if you are not in order, yielding obedience to the commandments of the Lord, so that when the time comes, if it comes, and I pray that it will not come to any of you, but when the time comes, you will be able to go to the Lord with a pure heart, and invoke his blessings upon you.”
April 1952 General Conference
- Unity
  - “Thirty years ago, from this pulpit, in a public meeting, I voiced a warning against what we then knew as Bolshevism and Socialism, and what we now know as Communism. I thought I saw it coming, and it came. No one can listen to what we have heard tonight, without joining in the feeling that President Stover expressed, thank God for this country and for our citizenship. And there is nothing that we should not do to preserve this country, and its liberties, and its free institutions.”
  - “Do not, brethren, get the idea in your minds, that you have a very unique situation in your own place. We hear that frequently. But when we analyze it down, we do not find the uniqueness that sometimes you feel you have.”
  - “Read your books. There is a startling parallel between the course that is coming in to us today and the course that was in the early Church, so startling that one becomes fearful. We have these little groups going off on their own doing their own interpreting of the scriptures, more or less laying down their own principles. They are small now, of no particular consequence, but that is the way it began in the early Christian Church, and these little snowballs grew and grew and grew until they became great.”
  - “I appeal to you, brethren, in all earnestness, in all kindliness, that we become united, united in following the directions of those who preside over you in the matter of administration; united in the matter of doctrines, that we do not permit ourselves to be led astray, that we study the scriptures and that we hold fast to the few, simple and elemental principles of the gospel, which are all-sufficient to gain us our salvation.”
- Our Destiny Was Planned from the Beginning
  - “Some of the greatest heresies that have crept into the Christian religion came in through a very few men who held no real official position, mostly, but who spent their time and their talents, and they were great, in trying to rationalize the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
  - “Salvation is ours, if we will but live for it. We shall forfeit it if we do the things which his prophets have declared unto us should not be done.”
October 1951 General Conference
- The Family and the Restored Gospel
  - “You cannot entrust your children to society. That will never do. Society is too tolerant of wrong, too ignorant of matters of right living, too easy to betray and debauch.”
  - “I hope that none of you will feel that your children are beyond the reach of temptation or transgression. The more firmly you feel that, the greater the danger to your family.”
- Feed My Sheep
  - “If, every time we started a little detour away from the straight and narrow, we would remember, “I am carrying my Priesthood here. Should I?” it would not take us long to work back into the straight and narrow.”
  - “I repeat that the Lord has said you are to feed his sheep. What are you going to feed them? Are you going to feed them—spiritually, I mean, of course—the right kind of food, or are you going to feed them with doubt, with rationalizing? Are you going to try to feed them on mysteries? Are you going to try to weaken the commandments of the Lord regarding the Word of Wisdom by yourselves smoking or drinking? Are you going to feed them alleged spiritual materials that are not spiritual, but are destructive of their faith?”
April 1951 General Conference
- United Against Satan
  - “And so I come back to my theme song in all of these meetings: We must have unity. We must work together. We must submerge our individual likes and dislikes. We must follow the plan that has been made and given to us. And if we do, then the body of the priesthood of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints can work, not only miracles, but can revolutionize the world. Unity cannot be manifest nor exercised by fault finding, back biting, complaining about those in authority over us, substituting our ways for the ways which are given to us by those who are our leaders, finding this excuse and that excuse for not doing what we are asked to do.”
- Not Where You Serve, but How
  - “In the service of the Lord, it is not where you serve but how. In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, one takes the place to which one is duly called, which place one neither seeks nor declines. I pledge to President McKay and to President Richards the full loyal devoted service to the tasks that may come to me to the full measure of my strength and my abilities, and so far as they will enable me to perform them, however inadequate I may be.”
October 1950 General Conference
- Warning Sounded Against Heresies
  - “There is an effort made in some quarters to destroy all idea of the sanctity of chastity. In some quarters it is taught that the urge of sex is like the urge of hunger and thirst and should be equally satisfied. That doctrine is from the devil and will lead to destruction for any man, any woman, any people that espouse it and practice it.”
- Priesthood Government
  - “Have you ever thought, and if you have not I suggest you do think about it, that if the civil government of any of our communities were to be suddenly wiped out, that the Church organization could govern the community if it were given the necessary civil sanction. To illustrate, our teachers who are to keep the Church in order, could act as the police force. Our bishops are authorized to hold court, the high council and the president of the stake another court, both of appellate and of original jurisdiction, with an appeal to the Presidency of the Church from that decision. And in the First Presidency of the Church, the President of the Church resides the power and authority to make all necessary rules and regulations for the government of the people.”
  - “We have already, therefore, set up in this Church of ours, an organization of the Priesthood which could govern any community if it were given the necessary civil sanction, and if chaos should come, and if we travel along our present line far enough it will come, some of you may live to see the necessity of such an action as that.”
April 1950 General Conference
- A Humble Heart and a Contrite Spirit
  - “Where there is repentance, we shall forgive and receive into fellowship the repentant transgressor, leaving to God the final disposition of the sin.”
- Power of the Priesthood
  - “An essential part of unity is loyalty. There can be no union where loyalty does not exist. Loyalty is a pretty difficult quality to possess. It requires the ability to put away selfishness, greed ambition and all of the baser qualities of the human mind. You can not be loyal unless you are willing to surrender. There is no growth mental, physical or spiritual, unless there be some curtailment, some sacrifice, may I say, on the part of him who would be loyal. His own preferences and desires must be put away, and he must see only the great purpose which lies out ahead.”
  - “I would like to urge you brethren to read the scriptures, not somebody’s interpretation of them. Read them. They are the original sources.”
- He Is Risen
  - “May this testimony, which is also mine, grow in the hearts of all who now have it, and may it come to all who yet seek till they find it, that they may have eternal life, I humbly pray, in the name of him who died that men might live, and who is now risen.”
October 1949 General Conference
- Sin
  - “It is my belief that there is only one way to handle sin and that is to take it by the throat and throttle it. Now, I do not mean that you go around killing people; I do not mean that you should throw them out of the Church; I do not mean that you should be unkind, unsympathetic, uncharitable, but the Lord does not look upon sin with the least degree of allowance, though he has all charity for the individual sinner, whom he tries to win back.”
  - “A mind engrossed in sex is not good for much else.”
April 1949 General Conference
- Beware of False Prophets
  - “The priesthood never compels. God himself does not compel the intellect, nor does he attempt to overthrow it.”
  - “Thus those who would drive out the God of the Old Testament must deny the Christ in order to do it.”
- Appeal for Unity
  - “The Lord gave us our free agency, as you know, and we may think and we may talk as we wish, but we may not teach false doctrine for that is no part of free agency. In the spiritual domain false doctrine is the equivalent of libel, and slander in the civil domain. Those things we may not do.”
  - “Do not go off and try to reform the Church. Let us reform ourselves, and the Church will take care of itself.”
October 1949 General Conference
- Observance of Sabbath
  - “Now on this question of recreation, which I may return to again if I have time, I should like to say that there is not much excuse for most of us now to resort to the Sabbath for recreation. Those who labor have a forty hour week, which means that they have Saturdays off. They have an eight-hour day, which gives them quite a lot of time either in the morning or in the evening, and there is no need whatsoever to resort to the Sabbath day for recreation. There is an abundance of recreation time during the week.”
  - “The Lord has told us what we may do in the house of prayer, and what we may do in the house of prayer we may do, I take it, in our homes. We may seek learning. We may read good books. We may acquaint ourselves with languages, tongues, and people.”
  - “I call your attention again to the fact that the only places of gathering to which we are authorized to go, the only gatherings we are authorized to attend, are the meetings in the house of prayer. No other gathering is authorized on the Sabbath.”
  - “I think we may listen to good music in the home. I do not think we may go joy riding, nor to beach parties, nor on picnics! Nowadays, as this conference is witnessing throughout this valley and in adjacent areas, you may have what we may call movies right in your home. We shall have them tomorrow, Sunday. I think there is a great difference between looking at a good movie in your home and going to a movie house, a very great difference. But the home movies we look at should be of a kind that teach things specified in the revelations as in order in the house of prayer.”
  - “Of course, I do not suppose there is any need of my even mentioning, though perhaps it might be well for me to mention, that horse racing on Sunday is not a proper place for a Latter-day Saint to be. They have a good deal of it, they tell me, in the southern part of the state. I have been in touch with some of the officers and know how difficult they think it is to handle. If you Latter-day Saints cannot stay a’way from horse racing and betting on Sunday, I am not sure how much the Lord is going to listen to your prayers about some other things that you very much desire. Of course, we may not gamble at any time or in any place.”
October 1948 General Conference
- Not a Prophet—but a Listening Ear
  - “The trouble with the world is they do not want a prophet teaching righteousness. They want a prophet that will tell them that what they are doing is right, no matter how wrong it may be.”
  - “We do not lack a prophet; what we lack is a listening ear by the people and a determination to live as God has commanded.”
- Do No Dishonor
  - “Do you suppose that you can lay your priesthood aside if you should wish to do a dishonest thing, and then pick it up again afterwards and put it on and go on as if nothing had happened?”
  - “Do not dishonor your priesthood, brethren, and do not any of you let your life so shape itself that you will lose the powers which the priesthood gives.”
April 1948 General Conference
- Against the Time of Need
  - “I may observe that we owe no money. We shall not have to borrow any money to meet our budget. But in my own view, we must all watch more carefully our spending.”
  - “It is not the place in which we meet, but the spirit in which we gather together that concerns the Lord. Not pride but humility brings him into our midst.”
- Unity
  - “You cannot fill the hearts of men with murder and then have a normal world. When you get hate into the hearts of men, anything can happen—lying, cheating, stealing, immorality, and the thousands of other things that follow.”
  - “Brethren, I beseech you, put hate out of your hearts, fill them with the love of your fellow-men and bring into your consciousness the enormity of the crime that is contemplated and pray God that some way may be found to avoid it. If the nations will seek for peace in the spirit of the peace of Christ, it will be found. I fear they will not do it.”
October 1947 General Conference
- They of the Last Wagon
  - “In living our lives let us never forget that the deeds of our fathers and mothers are theirs, not ours; that their works cannot be counted to our glory; that we can claim no excellence and no place, because of what they did, that we must rise by our own labor, and that labor failing we shall fail. We may claim no honor, no reward, no respect, nor special position or recognition, no credit because of what our fathers were or what they wrought. We stand upon our own feet in our own shoes.”
April 1947 General Conference
- How Often Would I Have Gathered Thee
  - “Ever since the world was, he has offered us opportunities to serve him. He has tried to have us live righteously. He has forgiven, over and over again. He has tried to bring us back to him. Enoch, Noah, Moses—think of how patient he was with Israel, the destruction of the firstborn of Egypt, the crossing of the Red Sea, the providing of the manna, the striking of the rock in the wilderness. When it came to the time of the Savior himself, think how he tried to lead them to repentance, forgiving wherever he found people worthy of forgiveness.”
October 1946 General Conference
- Demand for Proper Respect of Human Life
  - “Thus we in America are now deliberately searching out and developing the most savage, murderous means of exterminating peoples that Satan can plant in our minds. We do it not only shamelessly, but with a boast. God will not forgive us for this.”
  - “If we are to avoid extermination, if the world is not to be wiped out, we must find some way to curb the fiendish ingenuity of men who have apparently no fear of God, man, or the devil, and who are willing to plot and plan and invent instrumentalities that will wipe out all the flesh of the earth. And, as one American citizen of one hundred thirty millions, as one in one billion population of the world, I protest with all of the energy I possess against this fiendish activity, and as an American citizen, I call upon our government and its agencies to see that these unholy experimentations are stopped, and that somehow we get into the minds of our war-minded general staff and its satellites, and into the general staffs of all the world, a proper respect for human life.”
April 1946 General Conference
- The Fruits of Right Living
  - “It is indeed our duty to gain that testimony for ourselves. Some may scoff, some may doubt, some may declare that our principles are false, but truth is never made error because somebody denies it.”
  - “We who have the testimony of the spirit, we know that foolishness to men may be the greatest wisdom to God; and we know we may enjoy that spiritual blessing and knowledge if we shall but so live that the Holy Ghost may reveal to us the Father and the Son, and the testimony thereof.”
- The First Great Cause
  - “I have said on other occasions, and I repeat now that there are being taught amongst us, unfortunately, doctrines which are utterly destructive, not only of Jesus the Christ, but even of God himself, and we must be on our watch that neither we nor our children be influenced, debauched, or polluted by such doctrines.”
  - “Brethren, this whole brood of false propaganda is an insidious approach and attempt to destroy the gospel plan and to overturn the Church. We must be on the lookout for it. We must fight against it wherever we find it. Hunt out those who preach it, seek to win them to a knowledge of the truth, seek to bring them really into the Church, because as they now stand and as they teach and believe they have no place among our membership; pretending membership they are worse than wolves in sheep’s clothing, they are as it were, Satan trying to appear as an angel of light.”
  - “Let us not be parties in any way to the paganism, the atheism that is abroad in the world and that is expressed in these statements that I have read, for they will destroy our civilization if they shall come to be the belief of the people and to direct their lives.”
October 1945 General Conference
- Sustaining Pres. Smith
  - “God give to each and every one of us the strength and the power to be loyal, to give up faultfinding, to give up trying to find new ways, to obey the commandments of the Lord—to obey those whom you have yourselves sustained to lead you, for without unity in leadership there cannot be progress and this Church cannot be built up.”
- A Tribute to Pres. Grant
  - “President Grant rarely preached doctrinal sermons but his whole teaching and his whole life was an exhibit of the righteousness and the righteous way of living which should come to all Latter-day Saints. We, all of us, thank God for President Grant and for his work. And I repeat, all that we gave to him we shall bestow, not only fully but willingly and gladly, upon President Smith.”
  - “Loyalty and sustaining do not consist, merely, in raising our hands when we are called upon to vote to sustain. Sustaining consists in carrying out the things which we are asked to do.”
- Truth and Simplicity in Church Ordinances
  - “There is a deep lesson in all of that for us today. Already there are coming in amongst us doctrines that have no part or place in the pure doctrines of the restored gospel. These heresies are creeping in insidiously. They come to us from the philosophies of men, in no small part from the philosophies of the Christian scholars of the day. They make our doctrines, as they made the early Christian beliefs, more palatable to our philosophers, but so surely as they destroyed the Christian church in the early days, just so surely will they destroy us if we do not stop them where they are.”
April 1945 General Conference
- Opening Remarks
  - “This conference is meeting with the approval of the proper Federal authorities. In conformity with the policy announced by those authorities for the curtailing of attendance at conventions, conferences, and like gatherings, and acceding to their request that we do so act, the attendance at this Conference has been drastically limited. This accords with the policy regarding attendance at these Conferences and other Church gatherings that was voluntarily adopted and put into force by the Church itself immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The attendance is based upon a representation of Church administrative units and has been worked out on a Churchwide basis, irrespective of geographic location, as was only fair and just. Our attendance at this Conference will be only about 14% of the normal attendance at such gatherings. We eagerly look forward to the time when we may again resume the holding of General Conferences with unlimited attendance.”
- The Church Welfare Plan
  - “To those opponents who are Church members, I wish earnestly to say: We need you now; we have needed you in the past; we would welcome you amongst us. Furthermore, we wish to say that if you desire or hope to keep the Spirit of the Lord and enjoy his blessings, you must cease your fault-finding and sometimes even your maligning of those doing their appointed tasks as servants of the Lord, and fall in and work with them, not against them. We need the aid of every member of the Church; we ask your help, but not so much on our account as on yours. This is a plea directed towards helping you to save yourselves from a threatened apostasy, which seems usually to follow fault-finding, disloyalty, and opposition to the Lord’s plans.”
- Postwar Planning
  - “To bridge over the time when they return as heroes for achievements in war, until they may resume their peacetime occupations and become heroes in peace and in peaceful occupations, to bridge that over is one of the tasks we shall have to undertake and to which we must give our best effort and best thought. I am not thinking of the temporal side of the bridge-over, I am thinking of the spiritual side, and what that means; and in that connection it seems to me that they who are to play the greatest part are the mothers, the wives, and the sweethearts of those who return.”
- About What the Lord Cares
  - “I think perhaps he cares little for our achievements among men, little for what we have done in a worldly way in the past, provided we come to him with a qualification which seems to me to be all-embracing: a pure heart and a contrite spirit. Without these we shall fail, with them we can but succeed.”
  - “He expects us to forget the honors we may have gained from this world and our work therein and to come to him, humble and contrite, with a firm desire and a firm determination to follow him and become fishers of men.”
- Train Time
  - “I would like to refer to a point that I tried to make yesterday regarding the mischievous gossip that is going about by those who are finding fault, by those who think that their idea about the government of the Church is superior to anybody else’s. I suppose there is not a section hand in the United States who couM not run the railroad better than the president and the board of directors.”
October 1944 General Conference
- Postwar Planning in the Home
  - “That is a bit of postwar planning that can be done by every man and the head of every family in this Church and in this nation, and in the world. It is a postwar planning that requires no knowledge of new elements. It is a postwar planning that merely requires that we shall live the gospel, seek the Spirit of the Lord, ask his help, a planning that requires that we and our families shall live in accordance with the principles which he has given to us. How can we do that? By prayer, by keeping the Word of Wisdom, by love, by respect for the rights of others, by that companionship in the home between mother and father, brothers and sisters, that can take the wounded soul back to the bosom of the family, and make it whole.”
- Closing Remarks
  - “I should like to testify to the power of prayer, and to say that it is a wise man who knows what to pray for. One of the things that we should seek in going before the Lord and in going upon our knees, is his inspiration and his wisdom to tell us what to ask for.”
April 1944 General Conference
- The Way of Unity
  - “I sometimes think it is hard for us to get to the Lord, and for the Lord to get through to us, through this pall of hate and murder which seems to envelop the earth.”
  - “Are we prepared to accept just what the prophet of God says and do it, rather than try to construe it to suit ourselves, to suit our own views?”
  - “The oneness must come, brethren, through being one with him who stands at the head of the Church. And it is the duty and obligation of every officer of the Church to square himself fully, wholly, unreservedly, without deception, without equivocation, to the mind and will of the Lord as revealed to our prophet, seer, and revelator. I say again, this principle relates to all the things that affect the well-being of the Church.”
  - “This oneness must be on the revealed will of the Lord to the president of the Church, as proclaimed by him. No other oneness can bring us safety and security, and in no other oneness can we go forward building the Church and bringing salvation to mankind.”
October 1943 General Conference
- Church Finances
  - “This group canning has brought to us this blessing which far outweighs any other that is incident thereto. From all over the Church we hear that it has brought into the wards, where it has been carried on, a feeling of unity, a feeling of brotherhood, or respect for our brothers and our sisters—a desire and willingness to help one another, that we have rarely, if ever, equaled in the history of the Church before.”
- Concluding Remarks
  - “If I might make that just a bit intimately personal: If I am not one with President Grant, if I as his counselor do not hearken to what he says; if I do not follow along the lines that he directs; if I do not lend to him every assistance and every aid which it is possible for me to give, I am not one with him, and I am not then among those whom the Lord calls “mine.” I may not be one with him and exercise my own discretion, consult my beliefs, trace out my own path in opposition to his, and what is true of me, is true of every other officer in the Church.”
  - “If we are one, really one, bringing together all of our wills and our forces of character, and our powers, and our abilities into harmony with the Prophet, Seer, and Revelator of God on earth at this time, there is nothing which is beyond our power in righteousness.”
April 1943 General Conference
- In These Times
  - “I urge you young women and girls to remember that in the schedule of crimes, unchastity comes next to murder.”
October 1942 General Conference
- Private Ownership…under the United Order
  - “In other words, basic to the United Order was the private ownership of property, every man had his own property from which he might secure that which was necessary for the support of himself and his family. There is nothing in the revelations that would indicate that this property was not freely alienable at the will of the owner. It was not contemplated that the Church should own everything or that we should become in the Church, with reference to our property and otherwise, the same kind of automaton, manikin, that communism makes out of the individual, with the State standing at the head in place of the Church.”
  - “Now, I am not caring today, for myself, anything at all about a political party tag. So far as I am concerned, I want to know what the man stands for. I want to know if he believes in the Constitution; if he believes in its free institutions; if he believes in its liberties, its freedom. I want to know if he believes in the Bill of Rights. I want to know if he believes in the separation of sovereign power into the three great divisions: the Legislative, the Judicial, the Executive. I want to know if he believes in the mutual independence of these, the one from the other.”
April 1942 General Conference
- Counseling with Councils
  - “Express ourselves freely in the council chamber while matters are under discussion, and then when they are decided, be up and carry on. If we ever get, in this Church, to a place where our loyalty is merely lip service, then we shall be in a serious condition. I know that the Lord will move the lip-servers out of their places.”
October 1941 General Conference
- Troubled Times
  - “I have been preaching against Communism for twenty years. I still warn you against it, and I tell you that we are drifting toward it more rapidly than some of us understand, and I tell you that when Communism comes, the ownership of the things which are necessary to feed your families is going to be taken away from us. I tell you freedom of speech will go, freedom of the press will go, and freedom of religion will go.”
  - “My brethren and sisters, our young people welcome, they expect that we shall tell them what to do and what not to do, and what not to do must be told them in such language, in such terms, and with such emphasis that they are not left in doubt. Try this on your young people and you will be amazed at the response you will get. They are hungering for the Gospel. See to it that we do not starve them; they must be fed.”
April 1941 General Conference
- To Be Peacemakers
  - “The end the revolutionists seek is fairly clear; it is the overturning of the whole existing order, political, financial, economic, social, religious, the complete destruction of our Constitution and the government established under it, and then the setting up of some sort of despotism that shall destroy, in all these fields, the free agency which the Lord gave to man. The revolutionists plan that this is to be largely done during the war, under the plea of war necessity; it is to be continued after the war under the excuse—if we are not then too cowed to require an excuse—that this new political order is necessary that we may rehabilitate the world. They count that then, after a little time, the revolution will be secure. There seems no doubt that this is their conscious, deliberate, planned end. We have gone a long way already down this road.”
October 1940 General Conference
- The Danger of War
  - “You young people, if you think enough of one another to marry at all, you should love one another enough to wish to perpetuate your association forever; if you do not think enough of one another for that, you may well hesitate long before you decide to go forward in life otherwise.”
  - “There are other enemies than human persecutors. We can be our own worst enemies, and drive ourselves away from our most cherished possessions.”
April 1940 General Conference
- A Great Many Topics
  - “Sisters of the Church, the chastity of the youth of the Church is largely in your hands. You must enthrone virtue in its sovereign place; you must bring back modesty, must let the beauty of chaste blushes still adorn your cheeks.”
  - “To you daughters: That man or youth who demands without marriage as the price of his favor or love the enjoyment of your body, has in fact nothing but sorrow and degradation to give you in return.”
  - “Any man or woman who demands as the price of his favor or friendship a surrender of any of your righteous standards of living, is offering to you nothing worth buying.”
- Sustaining of Officers
  - “Again speaking in terms of political science, in the Church the nominating power rests in a group, the General Authorities, but the sustaining or electing power rests in the body of the Church, which under no circumstances nominates officers, the function of the Church body being solely to sustain or to elect. In fact, as will be seen, the General Authority or other officer is proposed to the body of the Church for their sustaining vote.”
  - “Church-men do not seek Church office. The best evidence that a man is unfit for Church office is the fact that he wants it.”
October 1939 General Conference
- War and Its Causes
  - “There are always deceit, lying, subterfuge, treachery, and savagery in war, on both sides. There was in the World War. It is not always the other power that commits atrocities.”
April 1939 General Conference
- The Responsibility of Parents
  - “Christ did proclaim a peace—the peace of everlasting righteousness, which is the eternal and mortal enemy of sin. Between righteousness and sin, in whatever form, there can only be unceasing war, whether in one man, among the people, or between nations in armed conflict.”
  - “The righteous life is not for the other man only; do not hug this delusion to your soul. It will destroy you. The righteous life is for you and each of you also.”
  - “The home must have a husband and wife, with all the virtues that the Christian generations have given them; and to this husband and wife there must be born children.”
  - “The prime, indeed the sole, responsibility for starting the child along the right way, rests upon the parents. This responsibility is the inescapable result of bringing children into the world. It cannot go unheeded, nor can it be cast off, or shifted to another. It is a responsibility that comes by divine decree.”
October 1938 General Conference
- Chastity
  - “Satan then proposed to do was to give salvation without labor, that is, to get something for nothing. This is the spirit which is abroad today. It is the spirit which we must fight, or it will destroy us.”
  - “Righteousness and hate cannot dwell in the same heart, no matter how great the righteousness nor how little the hate.”
April 1938 General Conference
- Debt
  - “After and above all, as was stated in the financial report, while the Church Welfare aims, of course, to help those in need, its real purpose is not merely to substitute Church gratuities for others furnished by charitable or governmental agencies but to rebuild the characters of its members and to promote and to foster the patriotic, civic, and spiritual qualities of the people.”
October 1937 General Conference
- A Simple Faith
  - “I am grateful for the simplicity of our faith. We do not believe in, nor live in, a morgue or graveyard of Christian principles which have supposedly been tried and found wanting, nor of blasted hopes. On the contrary, we have a living faith; a faith that guides us day by day and hour by hour; a faith that will lead us, if lived, back into the presence of our Heavenly Father; a faith that, hved here, will bring us a joy and a contentment that is beyond the power of any human pen or tongue to describe.”
  - “There is no good comes into the world, there is no good comes to the individual which in some way does not demand a sacrifice. Righteousness must pay the price.”
April 1937 General Conference
- Rumors of War
  - “Let us again clothe ourselves with these proved and sterling virtues —honesty, truthfulness, chastity, sobriety, temperance, industry and thrift; let us discard all covetousness and greed.”
  - “We must purge our hearts of the love of ease; we must put out from our lives the curse of idleness. God declared that mortal man should earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. That is the law of this world.”
- Speaking in General Conference
  - “I often say, and thoroughly believe, that whenever an Elder of the Church stands up to speak to the people, the responsibility as to whether or not he shall say that which the Lord would have him say is not wholly his. No member of the Church who sits before him but has the obligation to exert his power in prayer that those things may be said which shall benefit those to whom the Elder speaks.”
October 1936 General Conference
- The Security Plan
  - “We have proclaimed to the world, and we have proclaimed what we knew, that we have the Gospel plan, and that the Gospel plan not only takes care of our spiritual needs, but our temporal needs as well.”
April 1936 General Conference
- Faith, Belief and Knowledge
  - “Hundreds of thousands of Latter-day Saints, living and dead, have proclaimed their absolute knowledge of the truth of every declaration I have made ; some of them have sealed their testimonies with a martyr’s blood. To the testimony of the humblest of all these, I wish in humility to add my own.”
- Heresies to Avoid
  - “There are a number of heresies which today are abroad in the land. Mind they do not mislead you. When I say heresies, I am speaking of heresies in the matter of the Church, its doctrine and its government. Where you find brothers and sisters not understanding the true order, seek kindly and in a brotherly way to explain it to them and bring them back into the right path. If they are falsifying, teach them the error of their falsehood. Try to make them see that falsehood comes from the evil one.”
  - “If he undertook to tell us each time what we were to do in every detail—and the saints of the early days of the Church thought, as I have stated, that he should do so, and the Lord reproved them for it—two things would happen. In the first place we would virtually destroy the free agency of man, the foundation stone upon which all of our existence is built. And in the second place we should be under great condemnation if the Lord had to reveal to us his will and then we failed to follow it.”
  - “We may not, my brothers and sisters, think that merely by ourselves living we are doing our full duty. We must go beyond this. We must help our brother. “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” the Lord said was one of the great commandments.”
October 1935 General Conference
- The Path to Peace
  - “Until we, this people, can eliminate from our minds and our hearts all the baser passions of humanity there is little hope for peace, either among us or in the world.”
  - “I wonder if my life has been such that I could go and stand before the Being who could look me through and see my secret thoughts and hopes and ambitions. Unless and until, my brothers and sisters, we could stand that test, we are not living as the Lord would have us live.”
  - “Brothers and sisters, watch your families, your children. Teach them, honor them, lead them away from this terrible sin. I was taught by my parents that they would rather carry me to the grave than that I should lose my virtue, and I thank God for that teaching. Until we come to that teaching, until that is the feeling and the thought of the Latter-day Saints, lust will stalk among us and take his toll.”
April 1935 General Conference
- Our Constitution
  - “You must live in accordance with the principles of the Gospel if you are to perform the mission to which you are called.”
  - “Every man who takes on a responsibility by virtue of assuming office in worldly government, is responsible to the Lord himself for the way in which he carries it out.”
  - “One of the most important things that we can do for the Church is to stand behind the Constitution of the United States.”
October 1934 General Conference
- Through Honesty Comes Power and Dignity
  - “We are met today in general conference. Sometimes, I hear, the people feel, some of them, that perhaps we are not quite as “peppy” as we ought to be. But this is not a Church convention. This is a general conference where we meet for general counsel and advice. It is a place to which we come for the results of the reflective operations of our minds. We expect to hear reflective discourse. It is a sort of spiritual stock-taking for us. It is not so much the mechanics of the operation of the Church, that is concerned in a general conference, as it is the spirituality with which each and every one of us shall approach his respective duties in the Church.”
  - “One year ago, on this occasion, I called your attention to the abuses that had crept into the distribution of our public funds, and I urged you and pleaded with you that, so far as the Church and its membership were concerned, we do not soil our hands with the bounteous outpouring of funds which the government was giving unto us. I renew that plea now. My brethren and sisters, for the sake of the government which we love, for the sake of the government which we believe was divinely inspired, be honest with it. Be honest, just ordinarily gold honest. That is all I ask.”
  - “They are trying to tear down the worship of God and to substitute something else in its stead, and I regret to say that in some parts of this country, in some states of this Union, the issue now seems to be between an ordered, law-governed society and a despotism destructive of religion and of all that our government stands for.”
  - “We believe in the United Order, something that was taken away from us because we could not live it, and the lesser law was given, the law of tithing—which we are not living either; but our belief in the United Order is no reason why we should support a movement for Communism, to the overturning of our government. These two propositions are absolutely parallel, the one as rational and reasonable as the other. When the Lord wants his people to move into the United Order he will use his anointed servant to direct the way.”
April 1934 General Conference
- Truths
  - “There is creeping amongst us now as always, and probably no more now than always, error; and error is sin. We should be on our watch against error in whatever guise it may come. It would be easy to meet and overcome error if it came branded as such. The great body of the Church, I am grateful to the Lord to say, is able to detect error and sin no matter in what clothing it may come. There are a few, however, who need your assistance, and mine, and to them should always be open the arms of forgiveness, and to them should always be available kind words, admonition, kind thoughts, and sound advice.”
  - “The first truth to which I wish to refer is the truth that truth is true. There is some dissemination of doctrine amongst us that all is relative and that we have no truth in the absolute. We may not have in all its fullness the ultimate truth; I doubt that if we had it, we could understand it. But, my brethren and sisters, what we do have is this: So far as the Lord has spoken he has given us the truth. He has not taught us error. So the first great truth to which I call your attention, the first truth that I want the youth of Zion to have burned into their hearts, is the truth that there is truth.”
  - “The second truth that I want to call to your attention is the truth that salvation, exaltation, can come only by obedience to the laws and commandments of the Lord, can come only through the atonement of the Savior, and that he is the truth.”
  - “We must never forget that Jesus is the Christ, the Redeemer of the world. There is no escape from this, my brethren and sisters. Turn, twist, philosophize, mass sophistries as we will, this great truth remains.”
  - “The Lord does not ask us to take his truths without trial. He asks us to test them.”
  - “Just as a scientific experiment must be performed under proper conditions of heat and light and pressure and absolute cleanliness, so the spiritual experiment must be performed with a pure heart, with a desire to know the truth, with a clean body and a clean mind, in order that the one experimenting may not shut himself off from the very things he desires to know.”
  - “The Church must always war on error. There can be no compromise on the part of the Church with error. To the repentant sinner the Church, and we individuals, have all forgiveness; to the repentant sinner we open our arms in welcome; but against the sin which he commits the Church must always war.”
October 1933 General Conference
- Heresy
  - “Service for service’ sake is a great truth.”
  - “The world today is torn with heresy; it seems as if the more fantastic the plan and the idea, the more ready we are to listen, and sometimes to follow. It seems to me that we have broken loose from the moorings which we once had, that we have permitted our minds to leave those places in which they found peace and rest and to seek new places where neither peace nor rest is to be found.”
  - “What more anti-Christ doctrine could there be than that which we so frequently hear nowadays, that Christianity has failed. How could Christianity fail in this world, because so far as I know, Christianity has not yet been tried. When the world lives the principles which the Savior gave unto us, when the world becomes really and truly Christian, then it will be time enough to cast the score as to whether Christianity has failed or succeeded. An apostate generation may not judge and condemn truth.”
  - “There are some of us who go about saying that if this, or that, or the other man-made plan does not succeed, chaos will result. It is my faith, my brothers and sisters, that chaos will come only in the due time of the Lord, and when the world shall have fully and completely rejected his principles and his doctrine.”
  - “We should appreciate the Lord’s blessings, because he does not always bless those who fail in their appreciation, and our prayers should be not alone asking for what we want, but expressing gratitude for what we have. And after all, my brethren and sisters, the temporal things of life, food and clothing, and shelter, amount to very little, if we have enough for our actual wants.”
April 1933 General Conference
- A New Call
  - “Should any of you have hopes about my work in this high office to which I am called, I trust I shall not too much disappoint you. If any of you have misgivings, I can only say that your misgivings can hardly be greater than my own. I am keenly conscious of my own deficiencies. I come late in life to a new work.”
  - “It is the eternal, inescapable law that growth comes only from work and preparation, whether the growth be material, mental, or spiritual. Work has no substitute. Idleness brings neither profit, nor advantage, nor good—only a withering decay and death.”
  - “It is my faith that if the people shall shun idleness; if they shall cast out from their hearts those twin usurpers, ambition and greed, and then shall re-enthrone brotherly love, and return to the old time virtues—industry, thrift, honesty, self-reliance, independence of spirit, self-discipline, and mutual helpfulness—we shall be far on our way to returned prosperity and worldly happiness.”
  - “The world has been on a wild debauch, materially and spiritually; it must recover in the same way the drunken reprobate recovers; by repentance and right living.”
  - “God lives. We are his children. He has given back to earth his priesthood. He has spoken and is speaking through his prophets. To each, of us he gives spiritual light just in the measure we are ready and willing to take it, and his blessings are ours, not for sinning disobedience to the truth already given, but through the righteous keeping thereof. We may not rightfully expect that God will flash either to our minds or to our spirits new knowledge for which we are not ready and for which we have no need. We may rightfully expect only that God will give new lessons when we have learned the old ones and they no longer serve our wants.”

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J. Reuben Clark, Jr.

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