- “Joseph’s “marvilous experience,” as he called his revelations, came to him as experiential facts. Toward the end of his life, he told a Pittsburgh reporter that he could not always get a revelation when he needed one, but “he never gave anything to his people as revelation, unless it was a revelation.” Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. (Bushman, Richard Lyman) Kindle Location 231-233.
- “Born in the lowest ranks of poverty, without book-learning and with the homeliest of all human names, he had made himself at the age of thirty-nine a power upon earth.” Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. (Bushman, Richard Lyman) Kindle Location 330-331.
- “A plank in Smith’s political platform caught Quincy’s attention: “Smith recognized the curse and iniquity of slavery, though he opposed the methods of the Abolitionists.” He proposed to pay for the slaves with proceeds from the sale of public lands, thus respecting the rights of property while freeing all bondsmen. Quincy noted that eleven years later Ralph Waldo Emerson, “who has mixed so much practical shrewdness with his lofty philosophy,” had made the same proposal. Considering “the terrible cost of the fratricidal war,” Smith and Emerson’s proposal, in Quincy’s judgment, was “worthy of a Christian statesman.” Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. (Bushman, Richard Lyman) Kindle Location 335-340.
- “Quincy speculated that Smith’s influence would reach further still: It is by no means improbable that some future text-book, for the use of generations yet unborn, will contain a question something like this: What historical American of the nineteenth century has exerted the most powerful influence upon the destinies of his countrymen? And it is by no means impossible that the answer to the interrogatory may be thus written: Joseph Smith the Mormon prophet.” Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. (Bushman, Richard Lyman) Kindle Location 349-353.
- “Emerson worried that “men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead.” Now was no time to deny inspiration. “It is my duty to say to you, that the need was never greater of new revelation than now.” Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. (Bushman, Richard Lyman) Kindle Location 361-363.