COUNSEL TO THE YOUTH
From President Gordon B. Hinckley

You young people are very important to this Church. You can't afford to do anything that would represent a forsaking of the standards for which this Church stands. It expects great things of you, tremendous things. You're the next generation. You're getting there awfully fast. The years are flying by. You'll soon be old and a little balding and maybe walking around with a cane.

Now is the day of your great youth time. Don't ruin your lives, whatever you do. You have such tremendous opportunities. Stay away from drugs. They'll destroy you. Drugs will literally destroy you. They will take from you all control of your life, and you'll become a slave to them, and all of your future will be endangered because of them. Stay away from it. Don't get video tapes, things of that kind, of a pornographic nature. You are a youth of the noble birthright. You are the great promise of the future. You are the young people of whom we expect so very, very much as we look ahead. Keep yourselves worthy. Live up to the highest standard of which you are able. It's so important that you do so.
(From Halifax, Nova Scotia, member meeting, Feb. 12, 1998)

MAKING CHOICES
Pres. Gordon B. Hinckley

�We go along and think everything is going just right, and then we do some little thing, and it destroys us, it hurts us. It may be we act lazy about going to sacrament meeting and do not go. Before long we are not going at all. Or we get into some moral problem, a small problem that leads to a great disaster. It is not the big choices of our lives that destroy us. It is the small choices that we make from day to day; they are the things that cause us the real problems and lead to our downfall.�
(From Miami, Fla., member fireside, Nov. 17, 1996)