Lawrence Wright quotes

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)
I like the serendipitous surprises of reality. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Lawrence Wright
People are always asking me if I'm frightened, hanging out with al Qaeda, but usually those encounters are one-on-one interviews. I'm talking to people whose views I don't agree with, but that happens all the time. View quote
Lawrence Wright
Listen, bin Laden is - you know, he's not irrelevant. He was important all along. Just the fact that he was able to elude capture or being killed for nearly a decade, actually more than a decade if you go back to the embassy bombings in 1998 when we first went after him. He's been a symbol of resistance and also of the failure of American policy to reach out and stop this kind of terror. It emboldened other imitators all around the globe. So getting bin Laden is immeasurably important. View quote
Lawrence Wright
From the very beginning, when you go into Scientology your world narrows down very quickly. View quote
Lawrence Wright
Journalism is a flawed profession, but it has a self-correcting mechanism. The rule of journalism is: talk to everybody. View quote
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. View quote
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 worshipped as minor deities were in the ancient world. The idea was: if you could get them, think how many people would follow. (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. View quote
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. View quote
Lawrence Wright
You can't tell a story linearly if you want people to understand. View quote
Lawrence Wright
Scientology is probably the most stigmatized religion in America already. View quote
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. View quote
Lawrence Wright
The best ally in the struggle against violent Islamism is moderate Islam. View quote
Lawrence Wright
The most worrisome development in the evolution of Al Qaeda's influence since 9/11 is the growth of pockets of Islamist radicalism in Western populations. View quote
Lawrence Wright
Bin Laden is dead. Al-Qaida eventually will die. But the model that al-Qaida has created of an asymmetric terror group that has enormous consequences in the world well beyond the size of the group, that's going to endure. Other groups are going to try to follow that model. View quote
Lawrence Wright
The tug-of-war between Scientologists and anti-Scientologists over Hubbard's legacy has created two swollen archetypes: the most important person who ever lived and the world's greatest con man. Hubbard was certainly grandiose, but to label him merely a fraud is to ignore the complexity of his character. View quote
Lawrence Wright
If you call it al-Qaida or bin Ladenism or jihadism, whatever you call it, it's proliferated. (Lawrence Wright)
I've always been intrigued by why people believe one thing over another. View quote
Lawrence Wright
Unlike the talent for war, the ability to make peace has always been rare. View quote
Lawrence Wright
When you look at the science and the genetic studies that have been done on Palestinians and Jews, you find that there is a unity. They're both descended from the Canaanites. They're essentially the same people. View quote
Lawrence Wright
It's the hardening of these narratives that makes peace so difficult. If each side can see the narrative, the claims that the other has, then there is a much more likely possibility of making a resolution. But what I see is the opposite. There is a total disclaiming of the validity of the other side, and talk that I find really unsettling, the kind of chatter you get from ultra-right Israelis and Hamas is of annihilation. In that kind of dialogue, there's no way to move toward peace. View quote
Lawrence Wright