Primary sources
Brigham Young in his own words
Sourced quotations, grouped by subject. Every one carries its citation. Where a quotation is often repeated in a shortened or altered form, the entry says so.
This is a starting set, not a complete one. Every quotation on this page was checked against a held copy of the source before it was published here, and quotations we could not verify that way were left out rather than reprinted from a secondary list. That is why there are a dozen rather than a hundred. The set grows as each addition is checked; if you have a sourced quotation you think belongs here, send it with its citation to mormonstories@gmail.com.
On reading these. Most come from the Journal of Discourses, sermons taken down in shorthand by reporters and published in Liverpool. They are good evidence of what he said and imperfect evidence of his exact words. Read them as sermons, which is what they are: spoken, often blunt, sometimes contradicting a sermon he gave the year before. Several below are ugly. They are here because leaving them out would be a different kind of dishonesty.
On his own wives
I wish my own women to understand that what I am going to say is for them as well as others ... I am going to give you from this time to the 6th day of October next, for reflection, that you may determine whether you wish to stay with your husbands or not, and then I am going to set every woman at liberty and say to them, Now go your way, my women with the rest, go your way. And my wives have got to do one of two things; either round up their shoulders to endure the afflictions of this world, and live their religion, or they may leave, for I will not have them about me. I will go into heaven alone, rather than have scratching and fighting around me. I will set all at liberty. "What, first wife too?" Yes, I will liberate you all.
The most-quoted thing he ever said about his own marriages, and usually quoted in a form that stops before the next sentence. He is speaking during the Reformation, and he goes on to tell first wives that if they have borne all the children they are going to bear, "the celestial law would teach me to take young women that would have children." Reproduced identically in hostile, faithful and neutral sources, which is why it can be relied on.
Now recollect that two weeks from to morrow I am going to set you at liberty. But the first wife will say, "It is hard, for I have lived with my husband twenty years, or thirty, and have raised a family of children for him, and it is a great trial to me for him to have more women;" then I say it is time that you gave him up to other women who will bear children.
The continuation of the sermon above, and rarely printed with it.
On plural marriage
If it is wrong for a man to have more than one wife at a time, the Lord will reveal it by and by, and he will put it away that it will not be known in the Church.
Cited both ways. Some read it as anticipating the 1890 Manifesto; the same sermon also contains a vigorous defence of the practice, and two months earlier he had said that surrendering plural marriage would make the devil rejoice. Read the whole discourse before using it for either argument.
On sealing and adoption
Some would go to hell for the sake of getting the devil sealed to them.
On the eagerness with which members sought adoption sealings to prominent leaders. What the law of adoption was.
If men are sealed to me, it is because they want to be; and if they will be good, and hearken to my counsel and live a righteous life, I will agree to dictate and counsel them; but when men want to be sealed to me to have me feed and clothe them, and then act like the Devil, I have no more feeling and affection for them than I have for the greatest stranger in the world.
The adopted family was a real economic obligation, and he is complaining about it. John D. Lee, adopted in January 1846, called him "father in Israel".
Men will have to be sealed to Men, untill the Chain is united from Father Adam down to the last Saint.
The clearest one-sentence statement of what adoption was for. He allowed the practice to resume at St George in 1877; it was formally replaced in 1894.
On women
They never can hold the keys of the Priesthood apart from their husband. When I want Sisters or the Wives of the members of this church to get up Relief Society I will summon them to my aid, but until that time let them stay at home.
Eight months after the martyrdom, suspending the Relief Society. It was not reorganised generally until 1867. Eliza R. Snow, who was sealed to him in October 1844, later led it.
Also there was another way in which a woman could leave a man - if the woman preferred another man higher in authority & he is willing to take her, & her husband gives her up - there is no Bill of divorce required in the case, it is right in the sight of God.
A doctrine he says he had revealed only to a few. It is the clearest statement of the asymmetry behind several rows on the list - women who left him, remarried inside the church, and are still counted among his wives.
On children and parenting
If you are ever called upon to chasten a person, never chasten beyond the balm you have within you to bind up.
Still quoted approvingly in general conference - James E. Faust used it in October 1990 - and the gentlest thing on this page.
On theology
The man Joseph, the husband of Mary, did not, that we know of, have more than one wife, but Mary the wife of Joseph had another husband. On this account infidels have called the Savior a bastard ... That very babe that was cradled in the manger, was begotten, not by Joseph, the husband of Mary, but by another Being.
He is arguing that the conception of Jesus was itself a case of a woman married to one man bearing a child to another - the theological frame he used for polyandrous sealings. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does not teach this today.
The Scripture says that He, the Lord, came walking in the Temple, with his train; I do not know who they were, unless his wives and children.
On the question of whether Jesus was married, and to how many.