Alleged Secret Combinations in The Modern World
During the Cold War, LDS Apostle Ezra Taft Benson repeatedly described communism as a secret combination. Apostle Bruce R. McConkie claimed that "eliable modern reports describe their existence among gangsters, as part of the governments of communist countries, in some labor organizations, and even in some religious groups." LDS Apostle M. Russell Ballard described secret combinations as including "gangs, drug cartels, and organized crime families. ... They have secret signs and code words. They participate in secret rites and initiation ceremonies. Among their purposes are to 'murder, and plunder, and steal, and commit whoredoms and all manner of wickedness, contrary to the laws of their country and also the laws of their God.'" LDS President Gordon B. Hinckley compared modern terrorists to the "Gadianton robbers, a vicious, oath-bound, and secret organization bent on evil and destruction."
Ezra Taft Benson also stated in the November 1988 edition of the Ensign) in an article entitled "I Testify", that "A secret combination that seeks to overthrow the freedom of all lands, nations, and countries is increasing its evil influence and control over America and the entire world."
Read more about this topic: Secret Combination (Latter Day Saints)
Famous quotes containing the words modern world, alleged, secret, combinations, modern and/or world:
“In an age robbed of religious symbols, going to the shops replaces going to the church.... We have a free choice, but at a price. We can win experience, but never achieve innocence. Marx knew that the epic activities of the modern world involve not lance and sword but dry goods.”
—Stephen Bayley (b. 1951)
“About the alleged condition of the property. Does it have to be intact?”
—Margaret Forster, British screenwriter, Peter Nichols, and Silvio Narizzano. Georgy (Lynn Redgrave)
“We all have bad days, of course, a secret that only makes us feel more guilty. But once my friends and I started telling the truth about how far we deviated from perfection, we couldn’t stop. . . . One mother admitted leaving the grocery store without her kids—”I just forgot them. The manager found them in the frozen foods aisle, eating Eskimo Pies.””
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.”
—George Washington (1732–1799)
“Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders.”
—Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)
“They [the children] live in a world of delightful imagination; they pursue persons and objects that never existed; they make an Argosy laden with gold out of a floating butterfly,—and these stupid [grown-up people] try to translate these things into uninteresting facts.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)