Wilford Woodruff

“ We may go to prison, we may suffer all manner of persecution, but the principles we advocate will remain forever. When Joseph Smith's body was laid in the grave, his spirit, like unto the Son of God, went into the spirit world with the keys of this dispensation to unlock the prison doors. There were fifty thousand million of spirits that never saw the face of a Prophet, or heard a gospel sermon in their lives until Joseph Smith preached to them the message of salvation. Those people in the spirit world have got to have equal rights in the Gospel dispensation with those on the earth. ”

“ They are beyond the reach of man to handle or to destroy. You may put men in prison and abuse them; you may burn men at the stake; you may drive men from their homes who advocate these principles; but it is not in the power of the whole world put together to destroy those principles, they are as firm and independent, as far as the agency of man is concerned, as the pillars of heaven or the throne of God. I want the inhabitants of the earth to hear these things and remember them. The inhabitants of the earth have tried for generations to destroy these principles. ”

“ I will here say in passing that there is one principle that it would have been well if the Jews had understood, it would be well if all the inhabitants of the earth understood it, and that is, that it costs something to shed the blood of the Lord's anointed, to shed the blood of Prophets and Apostles and righteous men, to fight against God, against his Christ, and against his work. ”

“ Did the Jews kill the principles he taught? No. He burst the bonds of death, he conquered the tomb, and came forth with an immortal body filled with glory and eternal life, holding all the powers and keys he held while in the flesh. Having appeared to some of the holy women and the apostles, he then went and administered to the Nephites upon this continent, and from here he went to the ten tribes of Israel, and delivered to them the Gospel, and when they return they will bring the history of the dealings of Jesus of Nazareth with them, while in his immortal body. ”

“ I am an American citizen; a great many of this people are, I hope most are. I was born in the State of Connecticut, and many of the New England forms and teachings in our childhood, 65 years ago, were good to receive and live by. But what I want to say is: We live in a government raised up by the God of heaven. We have a constitution that was given by inspiration from God to man. ”

“ It is a generation when the Lord has decreed—and that, too, before the world was made—that in the last days the God of heaven shall set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed nor given to other people ”

“ Yet, as I have remarked many times in my public discourses, if we had preached until we were as old as Methuselah, we could never have got men and women to leave their homes if they had not been moved upon by the Holy Ghost. The Elders of Israel preached the Gospel unto them and promised them in the name of Jesus Christ, that if they would receive this Gospel they would receive the Holy Ghost. ”

“ They are principles that no combination of men can destroy. They are principles that can never die. Prisons cannot confine them; fire cannot burn them; the sea cannot, drown them; no storm can wreck them ”