Quotations

God is inspiring the minds of great people to create inventions that further the work of the Lord in ways this world has never known.

In recent years we have begun using information technology to hasten the sacred work of providing ordinances for the deceased. The role of technology in this work has been accelerated by the Lord himself, who has had a guiding hand in its development and will continue to do so. However, we stand only on the threshold of what we can do with these tools.

Moore’s Law is really a thing about human activity, it’s about vision, it’s about what you’re allowed to believe. Because people are really limited by their beliefs, they limit themselves by what they allow themselves to believe about what is possible.

My brethren and sisters, I rejoice in the largeness of this work of God—this dispensation of the fulness of times. I love it, in part, because of its greatness—in its very bigness there is inspiration. I love to contemplate the puposes of God in their farreaching possibilities. I rejoice to feel that today the children of men are moving up to a higher and truer conception of the things of God.

So that means that the twentieth century wasn’t a hundred years of change at today’s rate of change, because we’ve been speeding up. It was actually twenty years of change at today’s rate of change. Exponential change is quite explosive, so in the next century we’ll make about twenty thousand years of change at today’s rate of progress—about a thousand times greater than the twentieth century, and that century was no slouch for change.

[The Gentiles] will make wonderful improvements in machinery of every kind, especially implements of husbandry for the working of the land and raising grain, saving a great deal of labor to the saints in building up the kingdom. The Lord will inspire the Gentiles to do this, but they will not acknowledge his hand in it, nor give him the glory …

The present is an age of progress, of change, of rapid advance, and of wonderful revolutions … humanity seizes the lightning, tames and subdues it, and makes it the bearer of its thoughts and dispatches.

The truth-is-stranger-than-fiction factor keeps getting jacked up on us on a fairly regular, maybe even exponential, basis. I think that’s something peculiar to our time. I don’t think our grandparents had to live with that.

The world is getting better. One of the greatest evidences of it is the contrivances that men are continually bringing into use for the saving of time and energy. Only a few years ago the cured can of meat was about the only product of the packing house. Now there are sideproducts that form a great asset to the business.