Great Throughts Treasury

"An educated man is one who loves knowledge and will accept no substitutes and whose life is made meaningful through the never-ending process of the cultivation of his total intellectual resources."

"Honesty is not a particularly common virtue of churches, or of any other organizations. There is nothing new about churches perverting history... Most institutions, including churches, governments, and government agencies... often find it advantageous to ignore historical facts and do a little reconstructing here and there on their own history."

"It becomes part of a person's second nature; he belongs to the church, like he belongs to his family, and he does not quit his family because someone in it turns out to be a rascal."

"Many things have been intentionally ignored and sometimes concealed or have been taken to have religious meanings or implications which, in my opinion, have no religious connections whatsoever. I believe that the Church has intentionally distorted its own history by dealing fast and loose with historical data and imposing theological and religious interpretations on the data that are entirely unwarranted."

"Mormonism is not simply a commitment to a theology or a church practice, but a social-cultural order."

"No church can stand a close scrutiny of its origins and history without a good deal of moral and intellectual cringing."

"Censorship in the schools that denies intellectual freedom to teachers robs the student of that same freedom. And the freedom to learn is clearly no less precious than the freedom to teach."