The power of books

"The older I grow, the more thankful I feel to my parents in providing for us, in the home in which we were reared, good things to read. We had a library in that home with more than a thousand volumes....We saw our father and mother read, and they read to us. It did something of an indefinable nature. It gave us a familiarity with good books. We felt at home and at ease with them. They were not strangers to us. They were as friends, willing to give to us if we were willing to make a little effort."


"There is no way to blank [pornography] out entirely. But we can do something to offset its corrosive influence. We can expose our children to good reading. Let them grow with good books and good Church magazines around them."


"Years ago I read that Emerson was once asked which one of all the books he had read had most affected his life. His response was that he could no more remember the books he had read than he could remember the meals he had eaten, but they had made him." 
Gordon B. Hinckley, April 1982

The power of thought on action

"...[T]o consent verbally to do the right thing and then to live and to act without effort to achieve what is right, is ruinous."


"All evils to which so many become addicted begin in the mind and in the way one thinks....The body is indeed the servant of the mind."
Joseph B. Wirthlin, April 1982


"Man is made or unmade by himself; in the armory of thought he forges the weapons by which he destroys himself; he also fashions the tools with which he builds for himself heavenly mansions of joy and strength and peace. By the right choice and true application of thought, man ascends to the Divine Perfection; by the abuse and wrong application of thought, he descends below the level of the beast. Between these two extremes are all the grades of character, and man is their maker and master....All that a man achieves and all that he fails to achieve is the direct result of his own thoughts."
James Allen, As a Man Thinketh 


"Vulgarity [now known as pornography] is an expression of arrested development in matters of good taste and good character....Vulgarity weakens the mind, and thus brings all other weakness in its train....It is vulgar to like poor music, to read weak books, to feed on sensational newspapers [or debasing TV],...to find amusement in trashy novels, to enjoy vulgar theatres, to find pleasure in cheap jokes, to tolerate coarseness and looseness in any of its myriad forms....[For] the basis of intemperance is the effort to secure through [thoughts first and then] drugs the feeling of happiness when happiness does not exist. Men destroy their nervous system for the tingling pleasures they feel as its structures are torn apart."
David Starr Jordan