Top 40 Lawrence Wright Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. You can't tell a story linearly if you want people to understand.
Lawrence Wright
#9. 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
#11. I don't dispute Scientology can help people; I think that is a very important fact to keep in mind.
Lawrence Wright
#12. 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
#13. Unlike the talent for war, the ability to make peace has always been rare.
Lawrence Wright
#14. Scientology is probably the most stigmatized religion in America already.
Lawrence Wright
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. If peace was really within reach wasn't it immoral to fail?
Lawrence Wright
#20. Religion is always an irrational enterprise, no matter how ennobling it may be to the human spirit.
Lawrence Wright
#21. 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
#22. From the very beginning, when you go into Scientology your world narrows down very quickly.
Lawrence Wright
#23. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. IRS is very poorly equipped to make a distinction between what is a religion and what is not.
Lawrence Wright
#28. 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
#29. Science fiction invites the writer to grandly explore alternative worlds and pose questions about meaning and destiny.
Lawrence Wright
#30. 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
#31. Dianetics, Hayakawa noted, was neither science nor fiction, but something else: "fictional science.
Lawrence Wright
#32. The Trade Center dead formed a kind of universal parliament.
Lawrence Wright
#33. I don't want to constantly be writing about terrorism and strife.
Lawrence Wright
#34. I feel like a 1960s graduate student. I still work on note cards. I've never found a better system.
Lawrence Wright
#35. Wherever you are, death will find you, even in the looming tower. O
Lawrence Wright
#36. 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
#37. Chaos and barbarism, which always threatened to overwhelm the movement, sharply increased as bin Laden took the helm.
Lawrence Wright
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. Journalism is a flawed profession, but it has a self-correcting mechanism. The rule of journalism is: talk to everybody.
Lawrence Wright
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