Lawrence Wright > Quotes

“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, The Looming Tower

“Religion is always an irrational enterprise, no matter how ennobling it may be to the human spirit.”
― Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“If you paid any attention to the role of disease in human affairs, you’d know the danger we’re in. We got smug after all of the victories over infection in the twentieth century, but nature is not a stable force. It evolves, it changes, and it never becomes complacent. We don’t have the time or resources now to do anything other than fight this disease. Every nation on earth has to be involved whether you think of them as friends or enemies. If we’re going to save civilization, we have to fight together and not against each other.”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“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, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“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

“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, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“Science fiction invites the writer to grandly explore alternative worlds and pose questions about meaning and destiny.”
― Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“The only thing they had in common was the grandeur of their vision.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

“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 Looming Tower

“Dianetics, Hayakawa noted, was neither science nor fiction, but something else: “fictional science.”
― Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“In every generation until mine, most of humanity lived with the night sky. As people began moving into cities and using more illumination, the sky gradually disappeared. There must be a corresponding loss of wonder without the stars to remind us where we stand in creation.”
― Lawrence Wright, God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State

“DISEASES HAVE A history of stirring up conspiracies. Jews were held responsible for the Black Plague in the fourteenth century, and they were massacred in hundreds of European cities, including two thousand Jews burned alive in Strasbourg, France, on Valentine’s Day, 1349.”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“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, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“VERY EARLY ONE MORNING in July 1977, the FBI, having been tipped off about Operation Snow White, carried out raids on Scientology offices in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, carting off nearly fifty thousand documents. One of the files was titled “Operation Freakout.” It concerned the treatment of Paulette Cooper, the journalist who had published an exposé of Scientology, The Scandal of Scientology, six years earlier. After having been indicted for perjury and making bomb threats against Scientology, Cooper had gone into a deep depression. She stopped eating. At one point, she weighed just eighty-three pounds. She considered suicide. Finally, she persuaded a doctor to give her sodium pentothal, or “truth serum,” and question her under the anesthesia. The government was sufficiently impressed that the prosecutor dropped the case against her, but her reputation was ruined, she was broke, and her health was uncertain. The day after the FBI raid on the Scientology headquarters, Cooper was flying back from Africa, on assignment for a travel magazine, when she read a story in the International Herald Tribune about the raid. One of the files the federal agents discovered was titled “Operation Freakout.” The goal of the operation was to get Cooper “incarcerated in a mental institution or jail.”
― Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“Disease was more powerful than armies. Disease was more arbitrary than terrorism. Disease was crueler than human imagination. And yet young people like these doctors were willing to stand in the way of the most fatal force that nature has to offer.”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“There is no question that a belief system can have positive, transformative effects on people's lives. Many current and former Scientologists have attested to the value of their training and the insight they derived from their study of the religion. They have the right to believe whatever they choose. But it is a different matter to use the protections afforded a religion by the First Amendment to falsify history, to propagate forgeries, and to cover up human-rights abuses.”
― Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“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, The Looming Tower

“A friend of mine once said that when good people do good, and evil people do evil, it is not surprising. But when good people do evil, it takes religion to do that.” “I”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“How inadequate we are in our attempts to bring nature under our control, Henry thought. How careless of us to believe that we can manipulate diseases to kill, rather than to cure. We’re like schoolchildren playing with matches. One day we’ll burn the house down.”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“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, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“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, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“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, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“Chaos and barbarism, which always threatened to overwhelm the movement, sharply increased as bin Laden took the helm.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower

“The world was on the verge of a major pandemic of terrible lethality.”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“Those laboratory animals have done us no harm. They are tortured and murdered in the name of science. I know, I used to do it myself to my great shame. Is the benefit to humanity worth the sacrifice of so many animal lives? I say, No.”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“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, The Looming Tower

“Hubbard mentions an organization he calls SMERSH, a name taken from James Bond novels. Hubbard describes it as a “hidden government …that aspired to world domination!” Psychiatry is the dominating force behind this sinister institution.”
― Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“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, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“At best, Henry had only slowed an inevitable, history-shaping pandemic. Governments would fall. Economies would collapse. Wars would arise. Why did we think that our own modern era was immune to the assault of humanity’s most cunning and relentless enemy, the microbe?”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“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 Looming Tower