I had not been married scarcely five minutes, and made one proclamation of the Gospel, before it was reported that I had seven wives.... I am innocent of all these charges.... What a thing it is for a man to be accused of committing adultery, and having seven wives, when I can only find one. I am the same man, and as innocent as I was fourteen years ago; and I can prove them all perjurers.
Solomon'sexcess became an insult upon the privileges of mankind; for by the same plan of luxury, which made it necessary to have forty thousand stalls of horses,--he had unfortunately miscalculated his other wants, and so had seven hundred wives....
Wise--deluded man!
An innocent man, if accused, can be acquitted; a guilty man, unless accused, cannot be condemned. It is, however, more advantageous to absolve an innocent than not to prosecute a guilty man.
Solomon, who was one of the Deity's favorites, had a copulation cabinet composed of seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. To save his life he could not have kept two of these young creatures satisfactorily refreshed, even if he had fifteen experts to help him. Necessarily almost the entire thousand had to go hungry for years and years on a stretch. Conceive of a man hardhearted enough to look daily upon all that suffering and not be moved to mitigate it.
A few years ago one of my wives, when talking about wives leaving their husbands said, 'I wish my husband's wives would leave him, every soul of them except myself.' That is the way they all feel, more or less, at times, both old and young.
I am not the same man I was 35 years ago. And I hope that five years and ten years from now, I'll be a better man, a more mature man, a wiser man, a more humble man and a more spirited man to serve the good of my people and the good of humanity.
I didn't major in anthropology in college, but I do feel I had an education in different cultures very early on. My parents divorced when I was eleven, and my father immediately married a woman with three children and was with her for five years. When they got divorced, he immediately married a woman with four children. In the meantime, my mother married a man who had seven children. So I was going from one family to another between the ages of eleven and eighteen.
My grandfather was a polygamous man, and he had two wives, and between him and his two wives, we are about 200 or so in our family.
Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'. Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.
Many Westerners forget that when the Prophet spoke of four wives as the maximum allowable number, he had in mind a reduction to four as compared to the number then often prevailing; moreover, Mohammed specified that a man should acquire more than one wife only if he could treat them all with equal justice - obviously a difficult feat for even the most diligent man to achieve. In effect, then, the Prophet curtailed the number of wives.
He wasn’t a hero. He wasn’t the man who stepped forward and saved the innocent. He was lost himself. Shadows had invaded a long time ago and stolen his life. But he would give anything he had left to be the man who found a way to save Judith
I had to think ahead. How much would I really enjoy committing five or seven years to working on this? When you're an unemployed actor offered a TV pilot, no matter who you are you're tempted by the good hunk of change to be made. It keeps you out of the unemployment line.
It's not about whether you are innocent or guilty. It's about whether or not you can prove you're innocent. If you can't prove you're innocent, then you're considered guilty. It's been flipped: Now it's guilty until proven innocent.
I can't imagine that I would be the person I am today if, over the last seven years, I had been married to somebody who didn't feel 100 percent comfortable with my drive, my ambition, my interest in thinking big and swinging for the fences.
I had seen so many injustices done in the court by well-meaning people. I had lost fourteen clients to gang violence in only seven years. I was angry at a system I thought had failed my clients, and I was part of it.
Of one thing, however, I am certain. Just as an execution without adequate safeguards is unacceptable, so too is an execution when the condemned prisoner can prove that he is innocent. The execution of a person who can show that he is innocent comes perilously close to simple murder.
The fact is that five years ago I was, as near as possible, a different person to what I am tonight. I, as I am now, didn't exist at all. Will the same thing happen in the next five years? I hope so.