Mormon Quotes

D. Michael Quinn

D. Michael Quinn
Each cane had a lock of Joseph Smith's hair set under a small piece of glass and then mounted in silver on top... Father always told mother to keep the cane by her bed and if she was sick to put it under her pillow and it would be a protection to her.
D. Michael Quinn, Pioneer Personal History, p. 3, see Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, by D. Michael Quinn, p. 316
D. Michael Quinn
B.H. Roberts, a seventy, had problems directly involved with the writings of Church history. In November 1910, Church President Joseph F. Smith told the Salt Lake Temple fast meeting that Elder Roberts doubted that Joseph had actually received a priesthood restoration from John the Baptist. Church president Heber J. Grant also required B.H. Roberts to censor some documents in the seventh volume of the History of the Church. Elder Roberts was furious. 'I desire, however to take this occasion of disclaiming any responsibility for the mutilating of that very important part of President Young's manuscript,' Roberts replied to President Grant in August 1932, 'and also to say, that while you had the physical power of eliminating that passage from the History, I do not believe you had any moral right to do so.'
D. Michael Quinn, Dr. Michael Quinn, Mormon scholar, Sunstone, February 1992, pp. 13‑14
D. Michael Quinn
Academic freedom exists at BYU only for what is considered non‑controversial by the university's Board of Trustees and administrators. By those definitions, academic freedom has always existed at Soviet universities (even during the Stalin era).
D. Michael Quinn, D. Michael Quinn to F. Lamond Tullis, August 29, 1988, in 'On Being a Mormon Historian,' p. 94
D. Michael Quinn
Oct 23, 1946 ‑ BYU campus newspaper reports that professor of religion Richard Thomson, announced in a class that "during a vision last night, it was made known to me that 'you bet' is the anglicization of "hubet," the pure Adamic word for "you're welcome." Either the word has survived relatively intact for many millennia, or else it was revealed to the true Saints in the nineteenth century as part of the restoration of all things. Personally, I support the latter view." This announcement leads to the creation of the "Hubet Society of BYU" (HSBYU), which in turn leads to an attempt to create an Adamic 101 course. The entire movement is crushed when Jesse Wright, Provo Central Stake president, speaks at a BYU fireside and calls Professor Thomson, who lived in the stake, "insane," "an apostate and a heretic." Professor Thomson soon disappears from BYU.
D. Michael Quinn, Mormon Hierarchy
D. Michael Quinn
Just last month, attorneys for condemned child‑killer James Edward Wood in Pocatello, Idaho, argued that his defense was undermined by a visit from local [Mormon] church leaders who talked to him about shedding his own blood.... His [Wood's] attorneys contend Wood is a victim of a Mormon belief in 'blood atonement.' ... Judge Lynn Winmill... heard hours of testimony during the past week about Mormon doctrine on apostasy and forgiveness of sin. Wood's lawyers even asked the bishop who presided over the church court that excommunicated Wood about secret temple rituals involving symbolic throat and slashing or disembowelment, but Winmill did not require him to respond.
D. Michael Quinn, Salt Lake Tribune, Nov. 5, 1994
D. Michael Quinn
In the past decade, potential jurors in every Utah capital homicide were asked whether they believed in the Mormon concept of 'blood atonement.'
D. Michael Quinn, Salt Lake Tribune, Nov. 5, 1994, p. D1
D. Michael Quinn
One of [J. Reuben Clark's] "fundamental rules" was "that I never read anything that I know is going to make me mad, unless I have to read it. To this rule I have added another, which is applicable here: I read only as time permits materials which merely support my own views." This stunned fellow lawyer Wilkinson to whom he wrote this explanation, "You do not have to get very far down in any article before you can tell whether or not the fellow is writing or saying something that is generally along the line of your own beliefs." More often he did not bother to read publications before dismissing their significance. Thus, he could draft a two‑page list of general criticisms about Fawn M. Brodie's biography of Joseph Smith and write a proposed review of the book even though he had not read it. In this letter to his brother Frank, Reuben explained that he circulated his proposed review among trusted friends "who have read the book." They told him that his sight‑unseen evaluation "more or less characterizes the whole treatment" in Brodie's No Man Knows My History. For example, his proposed review stated: "While the book seems popularly to be appraised as a chronicle of new and hitherto unpublished documents giving a true picture of the Prophet Joseph, the fact is it is almost wholly a rehash of charges against the Prophet that began to be made over a hundred years ago, which, being then discarded, were buried as base falsehoods. Since then they have from time to time been dug up and paraded again, only to be reburied because again found false. They are now dug up again and re‑paraded from motives that are quite apparent from the book itself. ... There is very little material used or cited that has not been already published. The book has a veneer of pseudo‑scholarship." That was a remarkable set of observations by someone who had not actually read the book he was formally reviewing.
D. Michael Quinn, Elder Statesman: A Biography of J. Reuben Clark
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