"The Lord knows and loves the elderly among His people. It has always been so, and upon them He has bestowed many of His greatest responsibilities. In various dispensations He has guided His people through prophets who were in their advancing years. He has needed the wisdom and experience of age, the inspired direction from those with long years of proven faithfulness to His gospel" (Ezra Taft Benson, "To the Elderly in the Church," Ensign, Nov. 1989, 4).

"Age is more a matter of how you feel, how you think, and what's going on in your head than what's going on in your feet—although I wouldn't want to be challenged to a foot race this morning" (Gordon B. Hinckley, Teachings of Gordon B. Hinckley [1997], 8).

"Even though our Creator endowed us with this incredible power, He consigned a counterbalancing gift to our bodies. It is the blessing of aging, with visible reminders that we are mortal beings destined one day to leave this 'frail existence.' Our bodies change every day. As we grow older, our broad chests and narrow waists have a tendency to trade places. We get wrinkles, lose color in our hair—even the hair itself—to remind us that we are mortal children of God, with a 'manufacturer's guarantee' that we shall not be stranded upon the earth forever. Were it not for the Fall, our physicians, beauticians, and morticians would all be unemployed" (Russell M. Nelson, "The Atonement," Ensign, Nov. 1996, 34).

"From time to time, Church leaders hear of grown children who seem to be good Latter-day Saints but are negligent or even maliciously indifferent in caring for their aged parents. Some have encouraged parents to distribute their property and then have put them away in institutions, sometimes with inadequate care and sometimes without regular visits and expressions of love from their children. I believe this was the kind of circumstance the Lord's spokesman, the prophet Isaiah, thundered against when he commanded, 'Hide not thyself from thine own flesh' (Isaiah 58:7)" (Dallin H. Oaks, "Honour Thy Father and Thy Mother," Ensign, May 1991, 16).

"Consider the 'lost battalions' of the aged, the widowed, the sick. All too often they are found in the parched and desolate wilderness of isolation called loneliness. When youth departs, when health declines, when vigor wanes, when the light of hope flickers ever so dimly, the members of these vast 'lost battalions' can be succored and sustained by the hand that helps and the heart that knows compassion" (Thomas S. Monson, "Lost Battalions," Ensign, June 1971, 95).

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