Marion D. Hanks – Gospel Study

Marion D. Hanks

Presidency of the Seventy (October 1, 1976 – April 5, 1980; October 6, 1984 – August 15, 1992)
First Quorum of the Seventy (October 1, 1976 – October 3, 1992)
Assistant to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles (April 6, 1968 – October 1, 1976)
First Counsel of the Seventy (October 4, 1953 – April 6, 1968)

General Conference Addresses

October 1992 General Conference
- A Loving, Communicating God
  - “Thus two great principles on which the gospel is centered, love and agency, are plainly taught. Each of us is here to learn to love and give and hearken to the Spirit and choose to do the will of the Father. God wants his offspring and heirs to become all that we can be, to qualify for our inheritance. But we must choose; we are the decision makers, and he will not relieve that responsibility.”
  - “God does not deny us the experience we came here to have. He does not insulate us from tribulation or guarantee immunity from trouble.”
  - “Much of the pain we suffer and inevitably impose upon others is self-induced through our own bad judgment, through poor choices.”
April 1992 General Conference
- The Royal Law
  - “Nothing would seem more clear than the high premium the Savior put upon selfless service to others as an indispensable element of Christian conduct and of salvation. Helping, giving, sacrificing are, or should be, as natural as growing and breathing.”
October 1990 General Conference
- Changing Channels
  - “We are here on this earth to learn, after the example of the Father and the Son, to love enough to give—to use our agency unselfishly. We are here to learn to do the will of the Father.”
October 1988 General Conference
- The Royal Law of Love
  - “This morning I would like to speak of my deep conviction concerning one of the most sacred and significant principles in our Heavenly Father’s plan for his children, and to express appreciation and admiration for so many who so willingly and unselfishly manifest this principle in the way they live.”
  - “It would be difficult to find anyone offering resistance in principle to the virtue of giving service to others, yet there may be some who do not understand the place of vital importance in the fundamentals of our faith that Jesus gave it.”
  - “Religion is not a thing apart from life. It is not principles and ordinances or missionary work or leadership as an end in themselves. It is manifested by the kind of people we are, by our relationship with our Heavenly Father and his Son and all of the commandments, by the measure in which we qualify for the approval of our own Spirit-guided conscience, and by the way we treat other people.”
  - “Adversity is all about us and among us. It is an inevitable element of mortality, and all of us have some share in it ultimately. But our religion, centering in the life and mission of the Lord Jesus Christ, helps us comprehend that.”
  - “The royal law of love is of sacred significance in the Lord’s program for his people—an element as vital as any other in the gospel. It is inseparable from them and the spirit of them.”
October 1986 General Conference
- “I Will Look unto the Lord”
  - “The oppressing presence of problems all about us—personal, family, and in our society—accentuates the peril as well as the privilege of free agency.”
  - “None of us has ever met a mortal in whom we could comfortably rest our salvation. Only one qualifies for that trust, and he is the Holy One of Israel.”
October 1984 General Conference
- Eternal Marriage
  - “Married people should be best friends; no relationship on earth needs friendship as much as marriage.”
  - “Friendship in a marriage is so important. It blows away the chaff and takes the kernel, rejoices in the uniqueness of the other, listens patiently, gives generously, forgives freely. Friendship will motivate one to cross the room one day and say, “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean that.” It will not pretend perfection nor demand it. It will not insist that both respond exactly the same in every thought and feeling, but it will bring to the union honesty, integrity. There will be repentance and forgiveness in every marriage—every good marriage—and respect and trust.”
October 1983 General Conference
- Agency and Love
  - “It is my deep conviction that any act or program or rule planned or performed without love at its heart, love as the spirit of it, or which curtails the agency of our Heavenly Father’s children, is not worthy of God’s kingdom or of his leaders or people.”
October 1981 General Conference
- “My Specialty Is Mercy”
  - “The specialty of the Savior is mercy. And he requires that we be specialists in mercy.”
April 1980 General Conference
- Willing to Receive
  - “We know, you and I, that we need the Lord. And he has made it plain that he also needs us as instruments of his love to his other children.”
April 1979 General Conference
- He Means Me
  - “I am one who believes that God loves and will never cease to love all of his children, and that he will not cease to hope for us or reach for us or wait for us.”
October 1977 General Conference
- Seeing the Five A’s
  - “What really matters, after all, is what kind of people we are. The problems of the world are at root all human problems, and the opportunities in the world are at root all human opportunities. Those who help solve the problems and make the most of the opportunities are those whose priorities are straight, who are mature and strong in character.”
October 1976 General Conference
- More Joy and Rejoicing
  - “The Lord expects more of the disciple than ordinary response to need, to opportunity, to commandment. He expects more humility, more hearkening, more repenting, more mercy and forgiving and faith, more service and sacrifice.”
  - “Manifest your discipleship in civility, in gentility and tender compassion, in kindness and consideration, in patience and forbearance and refusal to condemn, in forgiveness and mercy.”
October 1975 General Conference
- You, Too, Must Know
  - “God bless you, and all sons and daughters everywhere, that each of you will seek to fashion a life of service and sacred devotion, give genuine love, and choose that course of discipleship that may require yet all we have to give. May your life be rich through personal experience with that love of God which is manifested through Christ Jesus and from which nothing but yourself can separate you. God bless you to be actively engaged in a good work, but not be content to let the gospel light be hidden under a bushel of activities designed to keep you harmlessly busy, but that you will find and feast on the bread of life and share it.”
April 1975 General Conference
- Trust in the Lord
  - “As life supplies its store of tribulation we need the consolation that comes with knowing that God is good and that he is near, that he understands, and that he loves us and will help us and strengthen us for the realities of a world where sin and affliction exist.”
April 1974 General Conference
- Boys Need Men
  - “Boys need men to learn from, men to be with who understand their need for activities that are challenging and socially and spiritually constructive and that stretch them and give them a chance to learn manly skills, men to love and who love them, men who are models of what a man ought to be.”
  - “How foolish we are if we reserve to ourselves, or for others than our own children, the knowledge and testimony of the gospel we have gained. They, no less than others, need and deserve this from us.”
October 1973 General Conference
- Forgiveness: The Ultimate Form of Love
  - “Not only our eternal salvation depends upon our willingness and capacity to forgive wrongs committed against us. Our joy and satisfaction in this life, and our true freedom, depend upon our doing so.”
  - “Envy, arrogance, unrighteous dominion—these canker the soul of one who is guilty of them. It is true also if we fail to forgive. Even if it appears that another may be deserving of our resentment or hatred, none of us can afford to pay the price of resenting or hating, because of what it does to us.”
April 1973 General Conference
- What Manner of Men?
  - “So closely is he tied with his fellowmen that in one of the most powerful parables he taught that bread given to one of the least of his brethren is bread given to him, and so is any kindness or act of grace or mercy or service. To deny help to one of the least of his brethren, he said, was to deny him.”
  - “Christ in our lives is not meant to grieve us or weigh us down unto death because we have been imperfect. Through him we may be lifted up by accepting his gifts and his mercy and long-suffering.”
October 1972 General Conference
- Every Man in His Own Place
  - “Christ’s commission was clear, and it seems to me that through him our commission becomes clear, that we are so to live that through him and his love we may be lifted up by the Father to enjoy the consequences of our convictions and our decisions.”
  - “Some other adults are not wise or sensitive to the needs of the young, or are guilty of cowardice masquerading as enlightenment and liberalism, or are indifferent.”
  - “To meet the tests of the times, the young person must think, put down roots, establish wise loyalties, learn and actively appreciate his heritage, and know that he is ultimately responsible for his decisions.”
April 1972 General Conference
- Joy through Christ
  - “Men without God and the living Christ in their lives lack center, and thus lack joy they could have.”
  - “Material objectives consume too much of our attention. The struggle for what we need or for more than we need exhausts our time and energy. We pursue pleasure or entertainment, or become overinvolved in associations or civic matters. Of course, people need recreation, need to be achieving, need to contribute; but if these come at the cost of friendship with Christ, the price is much too high.”
  - “That we have not found perfection in men or organization, or that we hear reports of imperfection—these are no reasons to cease seeking or serving or worshiping.”
  - “The frailties or failings of others can never be appropriate reasons for our loss of the blessings we might have if we ourselves are doing our duty.”
  - “There is no lasting joy in possessions. There is no peace here or hereafter in pride. There is comfort and understanding in the loving arms of him whose every act of courage, of mercy, and of love was performed in the shadow of a cross he knew was ahead for him, and in a world shot through with moral flaws.”
October 1971 General Conference
- Love Unconditional
  - “What can we do? How can we help this great young generation meet the challenges of their time? I am certain that we must thoughtfully examine not only their needs and their problems, and what we have to give them, but how we undertake to give it, and what we appear to them to be as they observe it.”
April 1971 General Conference
- Practicing What We Preach
  - “How much joy are we missing that we could be having and are meant to have, joy that we could experience only in our own home and no other place, only with our own family and with no other group?”
  - “Kindness, consideration, courtesy, care, laughter, unselfishness, prayer, thoughtfulness, doing things for each other, forgiving each other, sustaining each other, loving each other—these are notes that form a family symphony happily enjoyed and eternally remembered.”
October 1970 General Conference
- Bear Ye One Another’s Burdens
  - “The objective of it all, then, is not counting the sheep but feeding them, not the proliferation of buildings or units or organizations or statistics, but the blessing of the individual child of God.”
  - “The basic problem of our time is loneliness—the insecurity and anxiety that come with separation from God, and from one’s fellowmen, and from a sense of alienation from self that is almost always present.”
April 1970 General Conference
- The Key to Peace
  - “Peace among men and nations will be the natural sequence when enough individuals have peace in their hearts.”
  - “Turning to false gods will not bring peace. Turning to the gods of mythology, heathen gods, graven images, ethereal gods created in the minds of the worldly wise has only increased selfishness, greed, and lust, and has intensified contention, conflict, and strife. What men must do to find peace is discover and emulate the true and living God.”
October 1969 General Conference
- The Solid Majority
  - “It is this great principle, the worth of souls in the sight of God, that causes the Church, the Lord’s instrument, to be so very concerned with each age level of individual.”
  - “The point, brethren: We care about these individual, wonderful young people. Will you bishops, branch presidents, and executive secretaries care about their pink membership cards, or in some other way let us know where they are when they leave home for campuses? Will you wonderful young people accept our expression of love and interest? Will you go to an institute if you are on a campus and haven’t done so? Will you be involved in being, not seeming?”
April 1969 General Conference
- Commitment to Christ
  - “I bear testimony and thank God for this Good Friday, tragic as are the events which it commemorates, and for what it means to me and to all men, for what it lays before men of a future, for this day had to happen in order that Easter and its glorious events could come to pass.”
October 1968 General Conference
- The Tradition of Their Fathers
  - “What is the tradition in your individual home and mine? What “knowledge, doctrines, customs, practices,” and so forth are being or will be transmitted from our generation to our children and their children?”
April 1968 General Conference
- Where Art Thou?
  - “We know well that character is an achievement, not a gift, yet all men to some measure, most of us to some considerable measure, and too many of us to a tragic measure live below our moral capacity, are willing to accept a plausible lower view of mankind and of ourselves than we should or need to, and fail to make real the best that lies within us.”
  - “Faith motivates us to yield our hearts to him, truly yield our hearts. It motivates honesty to acknowledge limitations and vulnerability, willingness to learn, humility to seek help, courage to act, simplicity to trust. It is to have confidence in the presence of God.”
  - “The major source of our self-image should be our Heavenly Father, whose children we are, in whose image we are made, whose attributes and qualities we have within us in embryo.”
October 1967 General Conference
- Thank God It Can Be Done in My Time
  - “The solid majority of our young people want to do well, are doing well, and intend to do well with the great challenges facing them.”
  - “Across the world I have found them threading their way resolutely through the maze of a civilization often characterized by conflict and inconsistency, a civilization that could not exist except upon indispensable foundations in good homes, stable marriages, happy families, exemplary parents, yet increasingly beset by disrupted family life, contention, divorce, parents who do not teach or discipline or set a good example. The young are sensitive; they see the gap that exists between our stated convictions and our conduct, and they are bewildered, sometimes embittered. They say that the adult generation condemns a promiscuity it frequently practices, preaches peace and supports war, counsels the priority of the spiritual but in fact seeks first the material, talks of love but acts in self-interest, and generally represents a hypocrisy that cannot be admired.”
  - “No one can be truly happy who has a bad conscience, and bad conscience is the inevitable result of conduct below the level of our understanding.”
April 1967 General Conference
- Be Comforted
  - “My purpose today is to express my own deep appreciation of the validity and relevance of these instructions, and to say that I believe and accept them as the word of the Lord. But there is another side of this story that deserves attention and compassionate consideration.”
  - “God requires that we accept responsibility for our individual decisions; he deals with every man according to his own character.”
October 1966 General Conference
- Service in Quorums
  - “Now I would like to bear a testimony of appreciation and deep respect for you wonderful brethren and sisters who serve in the Church, who have the courage and the faith to face up to circumstances that are often quite difficult, maybe even depressing, but you do it. God bless you to remember that while the results may not be as spectacular as in this choice quorum, it is a certainty that if you, with honesty and integrity and a sense of your commission, seek to do the job the Lord has called you to do, wonderful results will occur. I know that.”
April 1966 General Conference
- How Many Apples in a Seed?
  - “Atheists do not find God for the same reason that thieves do not find policemen.”
  - “The individual, then, is the focal point of all the programs and performance of the Church—not the program itself, not the statistics. Not institutional expansion but individual exaltation is the purpose of it all.”
October 1965 General Conference
- The Many Voices Calling Youth
  - “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recognizes the difficulties that arise in the lives of young people as they listen, often in confusion, to the strident chorus of voices of those who seek their attention. The Church seeks to provide for its youth the direction and leadership and inspiration that will help them to travel ways of integrity and honor and decency and responsibility.”
  - “If there were time to testify what we have heard these young voices repeat and reflect in their spirit and their witness, it would be a very impressive manifestation that there is a place to hear the right voice.”
April 1965 General Conference
- How Fortunate Can We Be?
  - “The Lord has given us a great program of health, but not infrequently I expect some of us don’t tell our young people and maybe fail to recall ourselves that this program is based on marvelous fundamental eternal principles.”
October 1962 General Conference
- Substance or Shadow
  - “Comparisons of the revealed word of God and the Church established on the earth by Christ and his apostles with presently existing churches and their creeds and organizations and practices would be interesting. I commend to you this experience.”
October 1961 General Conference
- Preparation, an Antidote for Fear
  - “Through all the dealings of God with man there have been trials and troubles and afflictions and impositions and apprehensions, and there have been the repeated assurances of God to man that he should be of courage and not fear.”
  - “The Lord has given us in his great goodness and graciousness a foundation of firmness upon which we may stand if we will, without fear, but with faith, based on preparation, a preparation which he, through his prophets, has clearly spelled out. If you have had a testimony of the gospel, if you have felt in your heart this great stirring, moving, satisfying love of God, do you have it now? Are you obedient? Do you keep the commandments of God?”
  - “I conceive this to be the simplest and most understandable of human emotions. That which is beautiful and good and satisfying to the soul is infinitely more so when shared with those we love. I believe this is the foundation of the missionary work of the Church, of the Primary program and the genealogical program and the serviceman’s program, and every other effort made by the Church to lift and inspire and strengthen the individual child of God.”
April 1961 General Conference
- Teaching the Youth
  - “While the Church is primarily interested in prevention, the message of the gospel is one of restoration and rehabilitation also.”
  - “Is it not certainly true that the best friends we have in this world ought to be those of our own household? What kind of atmosphere would youth grow up in if that feeling were in the homes of the Latter-day Saints and perhaps through us in the homes of a great many good, faithful, loyal people in this nation and the world? How would it be for the spiritual prosperity of the young if they were assured of a love that endures and inspires and allows for imperfections and failings and mistakes and for repentance?”
  - “In addition to these fundamentals, youth need discipline, guidance. They need to be made accountable for their actions. They deserve to have fair rules established which are understood and then to have the rules consistently, fairly, and firmly administered.”
  - “Self-esteem comes only when we live a life consistent with honor and with high principles which we know to be good.”
  - “Young people need to be blessed with the opportunity to work. They must learn that there is no excellence without labor.”
  - “Young people need to find faith in God and immortality, in the purposefulness of life and the perpetuation of human personality beyond the grave. They need to know that families can be eternal. They need to know for themselves the sacredness of service and the holiness of prayer. People who really know youth and who have had reason to assess some of their problems are saying wherever I go that what the young lack most importantly is faith and courage; faith and courage—ingredients with which they may best be endowed in the home, tools which are not passed out in college, weapons which are not to be discovered in any military arsenal.”
October 1960 General Conference
- Pledged to Obedience and Loyalty
  - “Although one does not read in any one verse of scripture all that he needs to know, and although there is no simple formula of faith that is any one verse to the exclusion of all else, for God has given us much of his revelation, yet in this verse and in these others which reflect the promises of God, there seems to me to be the kernel of the conduct God expects of us if we are to achieve the magnificent promise he made to us. “Search diligently, pray always, be believing, walk uprightly, remember your covenants.””
  - “With all our protestations, sincere and honorable, with all our expressions of conviction and faith and testimony, there is required of us that we develop in us the heart that will move us to obey all of God’s commandments always, with the promise that things will be well with us and with our children always.”
April 1960 General Conference
- Who Shall Prepare Himself
  - “I count it one of the great privileges of my life to have been a student of the law for some years and to have acquired through that experience a great respect, as my father had before me, for the system of justice and the body of law which we enjoy in this land. This is not to suppose that every decision, judgment, interpretation, or application of law is good and just altogether. The workings of our appellate system, the initiation, revision, and abrogation of laws, testify that this is not so. It is to suggest that freedom and liberty rest on law, that our laws are rooted deeply in religious principles and rest on the moral law, and ultimately on the law of God, and that it is our responsibility at the ballot box, in the jury box, in civic responsibility and political leadership, in our homes and on the highways, to obey, honor, and sustain the law of the land, and to teach our children to do likewise.”
October 1959 General Conference
- Just One Boy
  - “There are two questions I asked him, which I think each person here would do well to hear answered as he answered them. I asked, in effect, how he had come to his feeling of antagonism and indifference. He told me that at age nineteen he had been ejected from a chapel by a bishop’s counselor who had been summoned because of the boy’s trouble-making in class. One thing that had been said, this man remembered for nearly sixty years. As he was thrown out, someone objected. The answer that came from the counselor who had the task in hand was, “Ah, let him go, he is just one kid!””
  - “He went, and he never came back, nor was there ever any visiting, never any outpouring or increase of the love that should follow reproof, according to the Lord. He moved to another area of the land, married, had a family; his wife passed away and he married again, his second wife died after bearing a family also. He had come to Salt Lake City at the insistence of his third wife, who, having been taught by the missionaries and converted to the principles of the gospel, had brought him here hoping that somehow he might be touched—he, the member.”
  - “Every son of God is important in his eyes. Every unbaptized child, unordained boy, young man who is not in the right stage of his priesthood progression, every boy and girl not attending seminary when they can and should, every boy and girl not being married the temple when they could—these are vitally important in the eyes of God and should be, in our eyes.”
April 1959 General Conference
- Something Missing
  - “There are many wonderful people in the world for whom I have personal respect and love, and whose intelligence and integrity I consider at least equal to our own, in terms of what they are willing to do for what they believe. Yet I testify with all my heart that there is something here for the finest of them, but it requires a consciousness that not all is well, that there is something to be had in the world besides social competence or other of the earthly pursuits which satisfy the ambitions of men.”
  - “I have been deeply blessed by the great strong statements of the brethren this conference reaffirming that there is something in the gospel and Church of Jesus Christ which will bless the lives of the very finest of men who do not have it, and who therefore have something missing.”
October 1958 General Conference
- For Man Is Spirit
  - “Recently I have been thinking about three great areas of problems which actually encompass the whole of human experience, the whole of an individual’s life, thinking about them in terms of the Church program and the principles of the gospel. We have a lot of youth problems and we know it, difficulties in many fields of youth behavior and experience. Then there is in our communities, and the nation, a great problem with unhappy adults—broken homes, marriages, and lives; increasing incidence of moral decadence, of alcoholism; increasing prison incarcerations and so forth. There is a third problem that I am not sure we have thought much about (perhaps in the Church we do not know as much about it as a problem as some do), and that is the field of geriatrics, the subdivision of medicine dealing with the elderly and the aging, many of whom lose status in the family, community, and business with advancing age.”
  - “While I could not choose nor govern the condition of the body into which I came, I have the responsibility to give it the best care I can, and if I do not I am acting in derogation of a great gift of God.”
  - “He has given particular emphasis to spiritual truth, but in addition to charging the early brethren to teach one another the doctrines of the kingdom, he also instructed them to prepare themselves in a wide field of knowledge, including languages, history, and law. In the Church there are the principles and program which can lead us to the possession of minds that are clean and honest, educated, trained, controlled, creative, productive, and useful.”
  - “Though we could not choose or direct in our earliest days the home we grew up in or the parents who bore us, yet we can do something about the sort of parents we are or will be, and about the home our children will grow up in.”
April 1958 General Conference
- Be Honest with Yourselves
  - “Believing that the young can be taught, and desiring to surround them with virtuous and uplifting and ennobling ideals, the Church has endeavored to provide experiences and influences and opportunities in the lives of the young which will bring into their beings, their minds, their very souls, the high and noble and decent things which will motivate them to contributing, participating citizenship in the world and in God’s kingdom.”
April 1957 General Conference
- Questions for the Iconoclast
  - “Do you know that some of our wonderful young people of great potential intelligence and capacity and contribution are abandoning their faith and their way of life in the gospel, with all the strength and beauty of it, because they have come to questions for which they have not learned satisfactory answers?”
  - “To abandon the marvelous demonstrable truths of the gospel because there are some questions one cannot satisfactorily resolve would be foolishness in the extreme. As President Clark said the other evening, “A foolish man can ask questions that the wisest cannot answer.” It is no reproach to our religion or to us not to be able to answer definitively, categorically, finally, every question that can be asked. I plead with you, and I talk not theoretically but with some of your faces in my mind, not to abandon all that is good in your religion because there are some things you do not understand.”
  - “Yet there come times when we reach the end of our capacity to reason and to understand. We must learn to walk by faith. There has been given us enough light to walk the paths we are here to tread. As the Lord in his wisdom desires that we have more light, we have the assurance that it will be given. I bear my witness that from the beginning of the history of the Church the lights have come on when the need arose. It has always been so; it is so now; it will always be.”
  - “Do you know that when one who has influence with youth, be he teacher, leader, or parent, seriously weakens the foundations upon which a young person has built, by faith-destroying challenges the youngster is not yet equipped to meet, he fashions a disciple who has been effectively cut loose from fundamentals at a time when he needs most to rely on them? The challenger may himself be a moral, educated, well-meaning person of integrity, doing what he does in the name of honesty and truth. His own character may have been formed in an atmosphere of faith and conviction which through his influence he may now help to destroy in his young follower. “Disenchanted” himself in his mature years, he turns his powers on an immature mind and leaves it ready prey for nostrums and superstitions and behavior he himself would disdain.”
October 1956 General Conference
- Steadfastness in Christ
  - “There is one other thought companion to these. Testifying that fundamental to everything we believe and hope for and have faith in is the great sacrifice of the Son of the Living God, knowing that he requires of us that we accept his great gift, there is something else necessary if we are to enjoy the high spiritual possibilities which it is within our capacity to achieve.”
  - “We accept with all our souls the absolute efficacy and essentiality of the atonement of Christ. We attest to the words of Peter and of other prophets ancient and modern that it is necessary for us to accept our Heavenly Father’s gift by obedience to what we know as the first principles and ordinances of the gospel. We know also that if we are to enjoy the high possibilities for which we are created and which we might desire as children of God, we must build upon our faith and obedience with right thinking and well-doing.”
April 1956 General Conference
- A Faith Based on Truth
  - “I suppose it is the most fundamental and axiomatic thing we might say of religious faith that to be fruitful and productive of good it has to be based in truth. The fact that there is widespread interest in religion in this nation and the world does not warrant the supposition that all those who have religious interest and religious faith will enjoy the peace and the sense of purpose and the abundant life promised the Lord to those who would find and follow his way, for it is not enough simply, to be “religious” or to be “sincere” in one’s convictions. It is not enough to be sincerely convinced of something that is false. We must have faith in true principles and live them courageously if our religion is to help us accomplish God’s purposes for us.”
  - “Man has within him, in an embryonic sense, those basic attributes which are characteristic of our Father in heaven and which are in him in their fulness. Man is capable of love, mercy, and justice, attributes which have their fullest development in him. We have assurance through the restored gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ that we are literal children of God, that we can become like him, that the ultimate of our possibility is that someday under his guidance we may even participate with him in his great creative work.”
  - “It is revealed anew in our day that not only must a man believe, but also that he must believe that which is true, and he must do that which God has commanded.”
October 1955 General Conference
- Having the Spirit
  - “May I say to you that there is nothing in this world worth having which you need to give up to be a good Latter-day Saint. If wealth or education, social preference or political prominence, power in your profession—if these are what you want, my testimony, and I get it traveling through the Church among the wonderful people of this faith, is that you may be anything you want to be worth being, and a believing, faithful Latter-day Saint.”
  - “If ever you need the Spirit of God, if ever you need faith and loyalty to his way, it is while you are educated (and the Church encourages you to become so) ; it is while you have wealth (which may come to you if you seek it honestly and use it wisely); it is while you are politically prominent or socially accepted; it is while, in your school activities and achievements, you find occasions for leadership.”
April 1955 General Conference
- Message of the Restoration
  - “Vital religion cannot be maintained and preserved on the theory that God dealt with our human race only in the far past ages, and that the Bible is the only evidence we have that our God is a living, revealing, communicating God. If God ever spoke, he is still is the great I Am, not the great He Was.”
October 1954 General Conference
- Therefore Ye Are Free Indeed
  - “This freedom of which Jesus spoke does not company with unrighteousness nor is it the product of the evil act. This freedom, this freedom which he taught as being most important to mankind, comes to those who in righteousness have faith in God, learn his law, and seek to understand it, and who, obedient to it, and with responsibility, seek to do his will.”
  - “Is that husband free, for instance, who with disloyalty to his wife and family and with lust in heart, entangles himself in alliances outside his own home? Is that father free who, neglecting his children, turns them away and does not love them and teach them? Is that man free who hates his neighbor, and who will not forgive the trespasses his neighbor has committed against him?”
  - “Is that wife and mother free who will not perform the duties of her home with joy in her heart, realizing this to be her great calling? Is that woman free who gives her time to selfish social pursuits of doubtful worth instead of to her neighbor, her community, her Church, her God, in honest service, when there is so much to do?”
  - “Is that boy free who trifles with good habits, who cheats a little in school, who will not accept sound counsel and loving parental advice, but who, making his own stubborn way (for he is of the age when he thinks he knows better than they) chooses companions who are on the wrong path, goes about his activities with them, perhaps even stealing from some others the most precious things they enjoy? Is the young girl free who thinks so little of herself that she allows herself to be handled as if she were worth nothing, or who talks with evil tongue about her friends or acquaintances; who will not be counseled, who will not be helpful or humble in the home?”
  - “My humble testimony is that real freedom is not irresponsibility or license, but that real freedom accompanies faith in God, the understanding of his word, and obedience to it.”
April 1954 General Conference
- Monumental Gifts of the Church
  - “Well, it has been a great blessing these years to be able to tell such good people, and many thousands like them, that the people who did the work which we enjoy here today and each day, were not ignorant. They were people of courage and faith and dignity and initiative and integrity, who were always willing to give up conveniences and comforts but never their convictions; they were not ignorant people.”
  - “God help us to appreciate the monuments around us. God bless us that we may have sense enough, faith enough, courage enough, to understand that there are marvelous truths that we might really possess, but which we must individually earn anew, if we would have them.”
October 1953 General Conference
- Tributes
  - “The principle I should like to suggest is one so basic and so simple that each of you knows it, and yet so important that scarcely anything we might say would supersede it, and that is that the gospel of Jesus Christ is a personal thing, a very personal thing.”
  - “I should like, too, as I leave this pulpit, to say to you that I do not come to this position faultless. I have been at times a little critical of some people in some instances. I do not feel critical today. I have been impatient. I do not feel impatient today.”

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