Famous Quotes

"Christ did not make the atonement when he shed his blood upon the cross. Let this fact be fixed forever in the mind." Uriah Smith, Looking Unto Jesus, 237

"We cannot depend on our own feelings! The Bible helps us determine who is a true prophet and who is a false prophet. It gives us seven specific tests. To my utter surprise, when I applied these seven tests to Ellen White, she failed them. All of them!" Dirk Anderson, 2005. See "Does Mrs. White Pass the Tests of a Prophet?"

"A lesser light pointing to a greater light? Why would anyone need a flashlight to find the sun?" Ray Pitts, 2000

"There is no other light than the Word of God..." H.L. Hastings in his book Great Controversy, published before Ellen White's Great Controversy (1858), 15

"Apparently her heavenly communications with angels were not enough to convince Mrs. White to give up meat. It took a Catholic woman begging her to give up meat on the basis that it was wrong to take the lives of animals! It makes one wonder how much confidence she had in her own visions!" Max Chugg, "Oysters and Herrings", 2001

“If any prophet teaches the truth, yet does not practice what he teaches, he is a false prophet.” Didache 11:10, 50 A.D

"If every paragraph in the book Great Controversy, written by Ellen White, was properly footnoted, then every paragraph would have to be footnoted." Dr. Donald McAdams at the special 1980 meeting of SDA leaders in Glendale, California

"Ellen White was using the thoughts, words and structure of other writers for her ‘I was shown’ [statements]. From the beginning with the ‘vision’ of William Foy to the end of her life she used the ‘inspiration’ of others to promote Adventism and her concept of its life style that was ‘necessary’ to please her God." Walter Rea, "How the SDA Spirit of Prophecy was Born", 1988

"This strong self-image as an inspired writer may have inhibited her [Ellen White's] ability to realize how much her writings depended on other authors. She could scarcely have sensed the degree to which her visions and dreams were shaped by her reading, and thus she came to believe that her revelations were the original sources of what she wrote." Ronald Graybill, Ph.D., associate director of the White Estate in his doctoral thesis, "The Power of Prophecy", 1983

"As the 'prophet,' she was given the heavy responsibility of passing the word of the Lord to the people; and with her education and background, she did not have the resources to meet the high expectations of her community. So what did she do? She did a very resourceful thing, and she did it quite surreptitiously. She went to the very sources that this cultic movement had unsparingly condemned as Babylon, gathered the best spiritual food she could find, and made it suitable for her community's consumption." Robert Brinsmead, Ph.D., Adventist Currents, Feb., 1984, 17

"Seizure disorder often develops from a severe head injury such as that suffered by young Ellen. ... There is an astonishing similarity between Mrs. White's 'visions' and a type of seizure called 'psychomotor' or 'partial-complex' seizure. ... Unaware that her 'visions' were part of a seizure, Ellen shared them with others who labeled her as a 'prophet' and made her the center of the developing Seventh-day Adventist church." Delbert H. Hodder, M.D., Evangelica, Nov. 1981

"When she had problems, someone else was always at fault. Ellen White was always the victim." Max Chugg, The Ailing Health Instructor, 2003

"No scholar seriously believes that Jesus Christ is sitting in heaven turning pages to investigate Christian lives". Desmond Ford, Ph.D., Newsweek, Jan. 19, 1981

"To say the least I was shocked when I read the Clear WORD BIBLE. It is pure rubbish and must by resisted by all means possible. It certainly cannot be the work of God. All over it, there are clear footprints of the devil at work. Unfortunately, when I brought this up to one of our [SDA] pastors they appeared equally dumbfounded. 'It is the work of infiltrators.' That is all he could say." Nkosikhona Ndlovu, SDA member in Zimbabwe, Aug. 2, 2005, commenting on the Clear Word Bible, a book published by the SDA Church that covertly incorporates the teachings of Ellen G. White into the Biblical text

"A row of graves in Africa mark the site of the first SDA missionaries. They were told by authorities to take quinine, but as Adventists they got their marching orders from a higher source. They knew that quinine was valueless: they trusted Mrs. White that she had been shown this by God, and as a result they died." Gregory Hunt, M.D., Beware this Cult, chapter 4, "Ellen White and Medicine", 1981

"Adventists insist it will be a 'final test' even though it is impossible to believe Jesus and the apostles would be silent on such a profound issue. If the final climatic battle between good and evil, the war to end all wars, is to be fought over the Sabbath, then why did Jesus and the apostles ignore the issue entirely?" Dirk Anderson, "National Sunday Law: Fact or Fiction?", 2001

"The way your mother's writings have been handled and the false impressions concerning them, which is still fostered among the people, have brought great perplexity and trial to me. It seems to me that what amounts to deception, though probably not intentional, has been practiced in making some of her books, and that no serious effort has been made to disabuse the minds of the people of what was known to be their wrong view concerning her writings." W.W. Prescott, letter to Willie White, 1915

"She [Fannie Bolton] said Mrs. White was in the habit of doing this, copying from various other books, so that she and Marian Davis had to go over the material and transpose sentences and change paragraphs and in other wise endeavor to hide the piracy. She spoke to Mrs. White about it and objected to having her own manuscript used without credit. Mrs. White was very angry and slapped her face." J.H. Kellogg, M.D., letter to Ballenger, 1936

"It seems to me that the testimonies, practically, have come into that shape, that it is not of any use to try to defend the erroneous claims that are now put forth for them." Uriah Smith, letter to D.M. Canright, 1883

"He [Joseph Bates] told me that the gifts were realized among them, that they had the gift of prophecy and the gift of healing the sick. But as long as I was with them I never knew of any being healed. I have known them to try but they always failed. In this I was disappointed. I also found the spirit of prophecy, with them, was confined wholly to a woman. By this time I became suspicious that I had gotten on board the wrong ship. I then commenced to giving her visions a thorough investigation. I found they contradicted themselves, and that they contradicted the Bible." Gilbert Cranmer, founder of the Church of God (seventh day), Hope of Israel, Aug. 10, 1863

"Most Adventists who learn of it will probably be able to accommodate the revised image of Ellen Harmon as a shrill-voiced, lounging, shouting, kissing, condemning, fainting, and footwashing, postdisappointment, Millerite fanatic. It may take some Adventists a little longer to assimilate the implications of Mrs. White's inability to remember her early ministry the way it actually took place. They will either have to assume that she possessed a particularly fecund delusional system...or that she consciously distorted the past for her own purposes." Bruce Weaver, INCIDENT IN ATKINSON: The Arrest and Trial of Israel Dammon, 1988

"I have a Bible that is about a 1-1/2 inches thick and can find my duty towards God as most Christians do. I do not need six feet of EGW books that contradict the Bible." Robert Sanders, 2003

"I have shown here that these trances were part of the enthusiastic worship experience of Adventism. They gained credibility not because they were unique but because they resembled the spiritual exaltations of other believers. Once Adventist worship grew sedate, Ellen's trances ceased, and her early visions acquired a miraculous aura." Ronald Graybill, Ph.D., associate director of the White Estate in his doctoral thesis, "The Power of Prophecy", 1983

"Twenty-five years ago, the self-evident truth that sin is not an entity but a condition that can exist only in a person, made it clear to me that there could he no such thing as the transferring of sins to the sanctuary in heaven, thus defiling that place; and that there could consequently be, either in 1844 AD or at any other time, no such thing as the 'cleansing of the heavenly sanctuary.'" E.J. Waggoner, Confession of Faith, 1916

"I should be recreant to God if I did not recognize the light that He has given me; I could never understand why it was given to me, except on the ground that His gifts are bestowed, not according to deserts, but according to need."E.J. Waggoner, Confession of Faith, 1916

"After Ellen White's death, some of those seeking to defend this wonderful gift went too far, creating an edifice that was built on shaky pillars...that has now created many more problems than it has solved. Worse than not defending the gift is defending it with weak arguments. We'd have been better off keeping silent than speaking things that weren't correct." Clifford Goldstein, Graffitti in the Holy of Holies, 2003

"Eld. White had published several of Ellen's visions on small sheets for general distribution; but as time passed on the theology of her later visions was materially different from former ones, and they were suppressed... these visions as published now are greatly in conflict with those which acquaintances and witnesses in New England were accustomed to hear from her lips, after recovering from her clairvoyant state, or to read on sheets as published at first, by Eld. White." Isaac Wellcome, History of the Second Advent Message, 1874

"After considering all the evidence obtainable...this writer is convinced that Ellen G. White was a highly impressionable woman, strongly influenced by her associates. That she sincerely believed the Lord spoke to her, none can fairly question, but the evidence set forth in this chapter gives good reason, we believe, to doubt the inspiration of her counsels, whether Seventh-day Adventists will concede this or not." Walter Martin in The Truth about Seventh-day Adventists, 1960, 111

"Cognitive maturation is a process of mental growth from a primitive, subjective, piecemeal collage of facts and supposed facts, hopefully toward an ever more accurate, symmetrical understanding of objective reality. During this process additional relevant facts are discovered, irrelevant opinions are discarded, and a wise person learns to monitor his/her thought processes and to base conclusions on the weight of evidence." Dr. Raymond F. Cottrell, Adventist Today, 1999

"Achieving objectivity requires the courage to critically examine cherished positions and to abandon those that no longer make sense, even though they may have been important sources of our security in the past." Dr. Reuven Bar-Levav, Thinking in the Shadow of Feelings, 113

"...It is not right that the spirit of prophecy is the only safe interpreter of the Bible. That is a false doctrine, a false view that is false, it is error. It is positively dangerous." A.G. Daniells, 1919 Bible Conference

"Evidence also shows that the record of Ellen White's accomplishments have been greatly exaggerated. Perhaps it was to raise her public image for the sake of institutional prestige, but fostering an unreal image of her will only undo her real usefulness among those who discover those exaggerations." Edmund Rogol, You and I, and Ellen White

"Only the future life will tell us how many men have been marked and destroyed by the Church leaders because they could not believe the White lie. If I have made mistakes, it was not that the facts and material that was discovered by others were wrong, but that I committed two great errors, one that you never question or go against the devines in any religious system and two, you never question the system or its promoted ‘truth’. History will show that more have been destroyed one way or another for these two reasons than for any other." Walter T. Rea, 2004

"I'm not sure she was conscious of what she was doing. When you look at her visions, hallucinations, depression and loss of speech, if she weren't a religious leader, you would have had her in therapy." Ronald Numbers, Washington Post, Nov. 7, 1980

"Ellen White demonstrated many behaviors, based on the historical record, with fit with both narcissistic personality disorder and a high-functioning sociopath. What may be most amazing and impressive about her life was that she was able to accomplish so much and gain such a significant following, while engaging in such dishonest, fraudulent, plagiarizing, unethical, and, in some cases, illegal behavior." Steve Daily, Ellen G. White: A Psychobiography, 2020, 301

"I begged them to show me my error from the Word alone, as I could not offer the writings of Mrs. White to the general public as authority in support of any position. It was finally agreed to use the scriptures only in dealing with the matter. But notwithstanding this solemn agreement, the first man to reply, Eld. S.N. Haskell, commenced, and continued unrebuked, to quote the writings of Mrs. White against me." Albion Ballenger describes his trial for heresy, "The Bible in the Reformation", 2

"I can truly say that never have I known a man of a kinder heart or more tender spirit than he, nor one who more genuinely and devoutly feared the Lord, or was more deeply devoted to His service and His worship." A.T. Jones writing on the death of Albion Ballenger, Gathering Call, Sep./Oct. 1921, 3