J. Reuben Clark Quotes

Debt never sleeps nor sickens nor dies; it never goes to the hospital; it works on Sundays and holidays; it never takes a vacation ... it is never laid off work ... it buys no food; it wears no clothes; it is unhoused ... it has neither weddings nor births nor deaths; it has no love, no sympathy; it is as hard and soulless as a granite cliff. Once in debt, it is your companion every minute of the day and night; you cannot shun it or slip away from it; you cannot dismiss it ... and whenever you get in its way or cross its course or fail to meet its demands, it crushes you.

It is the union of independence and dependence of these branches - legislative, executive and judicial - and of the governmental functions possessed by each of them, that constitutes the marvellous genius of this unrivalled document.

Reduced to its lowest terms, the great struggle which now rocks the whole earth more and more takes on the character of a struggle of the individual versus the state.

You have the highest of human trusts committed to your care. Providence has showered on this favored land blessings without number, and has chosen you as the guardians of freedom, to preserve it for the benefit of the human race.

Do you know that all of the money that we are spending, that the government is spending, must come from you? The government has no great pile of gold to which it can go to get what it gives you. The government has not one cent that it does not take from your pockets. Do not imagine, do not believe, do not go on the theory that you are not to pay this bill, unless the fundamentals of our government are to be overturned.

Not only does the Charter Organization not prevent future wars, but it makes it practically certain that we shall have future wars, and as to such wars it takes from us the power to declare them, to choose the side on which we shall fight, to determine what forces and military equipment we shall use in the war, and to control and command our sons who do the fighting.

I say to you that the price of liberty is and always has been blood, human blood, and if our liberties are lost, we shall never regain them except at the price of blood. They must not be lost.

Let us avoid debt as we would avoid a plague ... Let every head of every household see to it that he has on hand enough food and clothing, and, where possible, fuel also, for at least a year ahead ... Let every head of household aim to own his own home, free from mortgage. 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.

The youth of the Church are hungry for things of the Spirit; they are eager to learn the gospel, and they want it straight, undiluted" (The Charted Course of the Church in Education, rev. ed. [1994], 3).

But there is one whom you do not deceive, and that is Christ, our Lord. He knows all. Personally, I have felt that nobody need keep much of a record about me, except what I keep myself in my mind, which is a part of my spirit. I often question in my mind, whether it is going to require very many witnesses in addition to my own wrongdoing.

We get nearer to the Lord through music than perhaps through any other thing except prayer.

That man has a spiritual body is evidenced by the account ... given in the writings of Moses that man was created spiritually in heaven before he was given a natural body.

Let every head of household see to it that he has on hand enough food and clothing and, where possible, fuel also for at least a year ahead.

There is no curse equal to the curse of idleness. It destroys the man, the group, the people, or the nation who suffer under it.

I am not a strict constructionalist, believing that we seal our eternal progress by what we do here. It is my belief that God will save all of His children that he can: and while, if we live unrighteously here, we shall not go to the other side in the same status, so to speak, as those who lived righteously; nevertheless, the unrighteous will have their chance, and in the eons of the eternities that are to follow, they, too, may climb to the destinies to which they who are righteous and serve God, have climbed to those eternities that are to come.

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 ... When I find out these things, then I know who it is who should receive my support, and I care not what his party tag is ... Today, our duty transcends party allegiance; our duty today is allegiance to the Constitution as it was given to us by the Lord.

I am persuaded, from all the facts that have come to me, that it would have been possible, if we had functioned as the Lord intended us to function, if we had paid our tithes and our offerings as the Lord intended us to pay them, we might have gone on without one dollar from our federal government. And has it ever occurred to you what a mighty influence we should have exercised for good and for respect and for all of the virtues that we have been taught, and that God has commanded us to exercise and cultivate and practice, if we had just followed along what he has asked us to do?

What we get, we members of the Church, compared with the total mass that is distributed, is almost microscopic, but the spirit in which we might take it, the spirit in which we might spend it, is the leaven that might leaven the whole lump. Let us be patriotic; let us love the government under which we live.

If the gospel is only for the learned, how few there are of us who could have any use for it.

We may first observe that communism and socialism
which we shall hereafter group together and dub Statism
cannot live with Christianity nor with any religion that postulates a Creator such as the Declaration of Independence recognizes. The slaves of Statism must know no power, no authority, no source of blessing, no God, but the State ...