Agency
“Next to the bestowal of life itself, the right to direct that life is God’s greatest gift to man.”
– David O. McKay
“If you put all the doctrines of the Church in boxes and laid them on a large floor and asked me to assemble them in some order, I would sort through the boxes and find one. It would be a long box and a heavy one, and it would say ‘Agency, Freedom, Agency’. I would put that down first, and everything else we believe would be stacked in proper order on top of that.”
– Boyd K. Packer
“Perhaps the greatest discovery of my life, without question the great commitment, came when finally I had the confidence in God that I would loan or yield my agency to Him – without compulsion or pressure, without any duress, as a single individual alone, by myself, no counterfeiting, nothing expected other than the privilege. In a sense, speaking figuratively, to take one’s agency, that precious gift which the scriptures make plain is essential to life itself, and by, ‘I will do as thou directs’, is afterward to learn that in so doing you possess it all the more.”
– Boyd K. Packer
“You have agency, and you are free to choose. But there is actually no free agency. Agency has its price. You have to pay the consequences of your choices.”
– Dieter F. Uchtdorf
“If I were the emperor of the world, and had control of the whole human family, I would defend every man, woman, and child in the enjoyment of their religion.”
– Wilford Woodruff
“Apparently [President Henry D. Moyle] had been told that some missionaries in the mission had said that they had their ‘free agency’ and therefore didn’t have to get up at six in the morning unless they wanted to. President Moyle explained that it had been [their] right to choose whether [they] served a mission or not, but now, having chosen to serve a mission, [they] had exhausted [their] agency on that matter. [The missionaries] now had to right but to get up in the morning and do the other things required of a good missionary.”
– Joseph Fielding Smith
“(Moses 7:32-33) As we learn in these scriptures, the fundamental purposes for the gift of agency are to love one another and to choose God. Not that we are commanded – not admonished, not urged, and not counseled, but commanded – to use our agency to turn outward, to love one another, and to choose God. For this purpose you and I are here in the second estate. For this purpose we were blessed with the gift of moral agency.”
– David A. Bednar