Lawrence Wright Quotes & Sayings

I feel like a 1960s graduate student. I still work on note cards. I've never found a better system. — Lawrence Wright

He could easily invent an elaborate, plausible universe. But it is one thing to make that universe believable, and another to believe it. That is the difference between art and religion. — Lawrence Wright

To me the notion that Palestinians are actually Jews is, I think, quite revelatory and very radical and a possible bridge that has been ignored, I think, in this entire controversy and there's ample evidence to support it. — Lawrence Wright

People often pulled into Scientology want to address personal problems in their life, and Scientology says we have technology that addresses these kinds of problems. Just focusing on the problems and trying to remedy them can be helpful. — Lawrence Wright

If peace was really within reach wasn't it immoral to fail? — Lawrence Wright

I don't hold America responsible for the largely oppressive governments in the 22 Arab countries. There are repressive Arab governments that are our allies and there are those that are our nominal enemies. It doesn't make a whole lot of difference to what extent we're involved in propping up those governments. — Lawrence Wright

When I went to Egypt right after 9/11 I was very upset. I used to live in Egypt. I had a lot of friends there. I spent two years teaching there. I had very fond feelings for that part of the world, and the fact that a culture I liked so much had attacked my own culture was really very upsetting to me. — Lawrence Wright

Journalism is a flawed profession, but it has a self-correcting mechanism. The rule of journalism is: talk to everybody. — Lawrence Wright

However, twelve former Sea Org members told me that Miscavige had assaulted them; twenty-one have told me or testified in court that they have witnessed one or more assaults on other church staff members by their leader. — Lawrence Wright

Scientologists are trained to believe that whatever happens to them is somehow their fault, so much of the discussion in the Hole centered on what they had done to deserve this fate. The possibility that the leader of the church might be irrational or even insane was so taboo that no one could even think it, much less voice it aloud. — Lawrence Wright

After the war Cairo became a sanctuary for Nazis, who advised the military and the government. The rise of the Islamist movement coincided with the decline of fascism, but they overlapped in Egypt, and the germ passed into a new carrier. — Lawrence Wright

The British census of Palestine in 1922 recorded 84,000 Jews and 670,000 Arabs, of whom 71,000 were Christian, most of the remainder being Muslim. — Lawrence Wright

Science fiction invites the writer to grandly explore alternative worlds and pose questions about meaning and destiny. — Lawrence Wright

When I was trained as a journalist, as a race-relations reporter in Nashville covering the end of the civil-rights movement, we were strictly forbidden to use the first-person pronoun. There was kind of an electric charge around it. To come out from hiding and use the word 'I' carried a lot of fright for me. — Lawrence Wright

Churches are tax exempt because they are supposed to provide a public good. To prove that good to the IRS, churches arent supposed to hoard their money. They are supposed to spend it on goods and services for the faithful. Under this pretense, the church has made massive investments in tax free real estate all over the world. And when it comes to labor costs, they are almost free. — Lawrence Wright

I get very antsy when I'm not occupied. — Lawrence Wright

The church claims that the document is a forgery. — Lawrence Wright

Begin claimed that Sadat's visit to Jerusalem was merely a grand gesture, and that what Sadat really wanted was a Palestinian state and — Lawrence Wright

While they were still in the university, Osama and Jamal made a resolution. They decided to practice polygamy. It had become socially unacceptable in Saudi Arabia. "Our fathers' generation was using polygamy in not a very good way. They would not give equal justice to their wives," Khalifa admitted. "Sometimes they would marry and divorce in the same day. The Egyptian media used to put this on television, and it made a very bad impression. So, we said, 'Let's practice this and show people we can do it properly. — Lawrence Wright

Miscavige keeps a number of dogs, including five beagles. He had blue vests made up for each of them, with four stripes on the shoulder epaulets, indicating the rank of Sea Org Captain. He insists that people salute the dogs as they parade by. The dogs have a mini-treadmill where they work out. — Lawrence Wright

You can't tell a story linearly if you want people to understand. — Lawrence Wright

From the very beginning, when you go into Scientology your world narrows down very quickly. — Lawrence Wright

Christianity would be powerless to block this trend because it exists only in the realm of the spirit - "like a vision in a pure ideal world." Islam, on the other hand, is "a complete system" with laws, social codes, economic rules, and its own method of government. Only Islam offered a formula for creating a just and godly society. Thus — Lawrence Wright

The Trade Center dead formed a kind of universal parliament. — Lawrence Wright

From the very beginning of this movement, Scientology has always been a very closeted organization. That aura of secrecy is something that the present-day management continues. — Lawrence Wright

Chaos and barbarism, which always threatened to overwhelm the movement, sharply increased as bin Laden took the helm. — Lawrence Wright

The extravagant side of Mohammed bin Laden's nature made itself evident when it came to women. Islam permits a man four wives at a time, and divorce is a simple matter, at least for a man, who only needs to declare, "I divorce you." Before his death, Mohammed bin Laden officially had fathered fifty-four children from twenty-two wives. The total number of wives he procured is impossible to determine, since he would often "marry" in the afternoon and divorce that night. An assistant followed behind to take care of any children he might have left in his wake. He also had a number of concubines, who stayed in the bin Laden compound if they bore him children. "My father used to say that he had fathered twenty-five sons for the jihad," his seventeenth son, Osama, later remembered. — Lawrence Wright

What is true is what is true for you. No one has any right to force data on you and command you to believe it or else. If it is not true for you, it isn't true. Think your own way through things, accept what is true for you, discard the rest. There is nothing unhappier than one who tries to live in a chaos of lies. — Lawrence Wright

Scientology is probably the most stigmatized religion in America already. — Lawrence Wright

I like the serendipitous surprises of reality. — Lawrence Wright

Every medium has its advantages and weaknesses and there are many things I can put down on paper that I might not be able to put into film or into a stage performance. In each form, one can communicate powerfully in different ways. — Lawrence Wright

Americans already believed Carter was wasting too much time on the Middle East when there were more pressing problems at home. The country was experiencing double-digit inflation coupled with high unemployment and anemic growth - a confounding phenomenon tagged "stagflation." As for the president's job performance, the two dreaded lines on the graph finally crossed in the spring of 1978, with more Americans disapproving — Lawrence Wright

There are many countries where you can only believe more or you can believe less. But in the United States we have this incredible smorgasbord, and it really interests me why people are drawn to one faith rather than another, especially to a system of belief that to an outsider seems absurd or dangerous. — Lawrence Wright

IRS is very poorly equipped to make a distinction between what is a religion and what is not. — Lawrence Wright

Religion is always an irrational enterprise, no matter how ennobling it may be to the human spirit. — Lawrence Wright

Dianetics, Hayakawa noted, was neither science nor fiction, but something else: "fictional science. — Lawrence Wright

He was so far from being able to carry out such threats that one might conclude that the author of this document was utterly mad. Indeed, the man in the cave had entered a separate reality, one that was deeply connected to the mythic chords of Muslim identity and in fact gestured to anyone whose culture was threatened by modernity and impurity and the loss of tradition. By declaring war on the United States from a cave in Afghanistan, bin Laden assumed the role of an uncorrupted, indomitable primitive standing against the awesome power of the secular, scientific, technological Goliath; he was fighting modernity itself. — Lawrence Wright

Radicalism usually prospers in the gap between rising expectations and declining opportunities. This is especially true where the population is young, idle, and bored; where the art is impoverished; where entertainment - movies, theater, music - is policed or absent altogether; and where young men are set apart from the consoling and socializing presence of women. — Lawrence Wright

I don't want to constantly be writing about terrorism and strife. — Lawrence Wright

Maybe it's an insanity test, Haggis thought - if you believe it, you're automatically kicked out. He considered that possibility. But when he read it again, he decided, "This is madness. — Lawrence Wright

Wherever you are, death will find you, even in the looming tower. O — Lawrence Wright

The ceremony, likely aided by narcotics and hallucinogens, required Hubbard to channel the female deity of Babalon as Parsons performed the "invocation of wand with material basis on talisman" - in other words, masturbating on a piece of parchment. He typically invoked twice a night. — Lawrence Wright

Paralysis, anxiety stomachs, arthritis and many ills and aberrations have been relieved by auditing them. An E-Meter shows them up and makes them confess their misdeeds. They are probably just compartments of the mind which, cut off, begin to act as though they were persons. — Lawrence Wright

Koppel won an Emmy for that show. Miscavige took credit for it, saying, "I got Ted the Emmy." He even had a replica of an Emmy made and placed in the Officers Lounge at Gold Base. But he never went on television again. — Lawrence Wright

I don't dispute Scientology can help people; I think that is a very important fact to keep in mind. — Lawrence Wright

Success in the pulps depended on speed and imagination, and Hubbard had both in abundance. The church estimates that between 1934 and 1936, he was turning out a hundred thousand words of fiction a month. He was writing so fast that he began typing on a roll of butcher paper to save time. When a story was finished, he would tear off the sheet using a T-square and mail it to the publisher. — Lawrence Wright

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a lobby group created by the Church of Scientology that runs the psychiatry museum, maintains that no mental diseases have ever been proven to exist. — Lawrence Wright

The final exercise (according to documents obtained by WikiLeaks - Haggis refused to talk about it) was "Go out to a park, train station or other busy area. Practice placing an intention into individuals until you can successfully and easily place an intention into or on a Being and/or a body. — Lawrence Wright

There are many different rivers that lead into despair: there's poverty; there's political repression; there's gender apartheid - there's a sense of culture loss; there's religious fanaticism. — Lawrence Wright

The baby boom eventually prompted Hubbard to order that no one could get pregnant without his permission; according to several Sea Org members, any woman disobeying his command would be "off-loaded" to another Scientology organization or flown to New York for an abortion. — Lawrence Wright

I read a lot of books. Here are the books I'm using for my 9/11 project. [Wright gestures to three six-foot-long shelves of books.] As I read them I highlight certain passages. Then I have an assistant write down each quote on an index card and note where it came from. — Lawrence Wright

Coolness is temporary. You can't capture it or create it, it has to be discovered. It has to do with the people that are in a place, not with monuments or institutions. It's a momentary conjunction of personalities. — Lawrence Wright

Hubbard set up the Church of Scientology in Hollywood in 1954 for a reason. He understood that celebrity was increasingly a feature of American public life, and celebrities themselves were going to be worshiped as minor deities were in the ancient world. The idea was: if you could get them, think how many people would follow. — Lawrence Wright

Unlike the talent for war, the ability to make peace has always been rare. — Lawrence Wright

In the United States, constitutional guarantees of religious liberty protect the church from actions that might otherwise be considered abusive or in violation of laws in human trafficking or labor standards. — Lawrence Wright

The animals in the zoo-those that had not been stolen in previous administrations-were slain or left to starve. One zealous, perhaps mad, Taliban jumped into a bear's cage and cut off his nose, reputedly because the animal's "beard" was not long enough. Another fighter, intoxicated by events and his own power, leaped into the lion's den and cried out, "I am the lion now!" The lion killed him. Another Taliban solider threw a grenade into the den, blinding the animal. These two, the noseless bear and the blind lion, together with two wolves, were the only animals that survived Taliban rule. — Lawrence Wright