Best 47 quotes of Lawrence Wright on MyQuotes

Lawrence Wright

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Lawrence Wright

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

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    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.

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    Lawrence Wright

    Having written Camp David as a drama, I could see the drama maybe a little more clearly when I wrote the book.

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    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.

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    Lawrence Wright

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

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    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.

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    Lawrence Wright

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

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    Lawrence Wright

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

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    Lawrence Wright

    If we're talking about Sinai, we can't understand it without the 1967 and 1973 wars, and you can't understand it without the biblical story of Moses leading his people through the wilderness. These are essential elements in the modern conversation about what's going on in the Middle East that seem to have been lost.

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    Lawrence Wright

    I grew up in the American South, the segregated South. Now we have a black man who is president. It was an age of apartheid, and now that's over. It was an age of two superpowers frozen in a cold war, and now that's resolved. So history marches on, except for this Arab-Israel conflict, which seems to have a claim on being eternal.

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    Lawrence Wright

    I like the serendipitous surprises of reality.

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    Lawrence Wright

    In my couple of books, including Going Clear, the book about Scientology, I thought it seemed appropriate at the end of the book to help the reader frame things. Because we've gone through the history, and there's likely conflictual feelings in the reader's mind. The reader may not agree with me, but I don't try to influence the reader's judgment. I know everybody who picks this book up already has a decided opinion. But my goal is to open the reader's mind a little bit to alternative narratives.

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    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.

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    Lawrence Wright

    I think we give Jimmy Carter too much credit to think he knew what was going to happen when he used the word "apartheid." It's provocative, but it was like a nuclear bomb in Israel. And yet that word is used all the time in the Israeli press. There's a double standard there. He probably picked it up in Israel, as it's commonly discussed. I'd be a little surprised if he understood how it was going to be used against him. He doesn't have a highly developed emotional detector. As a politician, that was a weakness.

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    Lawrence Wright

    I think when I write movies and plays and books and magazine articles, they're all storytelling, and reality is the common denominator that binds them.

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    Lawrence Wright

    It's easy enough to predict that there will be conflict, but you place yourself in a maelstrom when you offer a view about the conflict, and I don't have an investment in one side or the other; I feel compassion for both sides. I've spent a fair amount of time in Gaza and Israel, done a lot of reporting and lived over there, and the tragedy is sometimes overwhelming. At the same time, America does have an investment in what happens.

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    Lawrence Wright

    It's funny how sometimes historians sneer at journalists, yet they depend on us in the future for the material that they mine. You realize that some of the stories wouldn't have been told if you hadn't gotten to them. There is that sense of capturing a moment that was just about to go over the horizon.

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    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.

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    Lawrence Wright

    Jimmy Carter is not loved in Israel, and yet no American president gave them a greater gift than Jimmy Carter gave them with peace with Egypt, and the opportunity to make peace with the Palestinians.

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    Lawrence Wright

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

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    Lawrence Wright

    Look at what Jimmy Carter did. Look at the risks he took for a country that wasn't his. Israel has benefited unbelievably from that. To fail to give him credit seems unfair.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Lawrence Wright

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

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Lawrence Wright

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

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    Lawrence Wright

    We hear a lot about theological justifications for the conflicts, but very little about the scientific evidence, which in no way supports them. The time period in which Moses was leading his people out of Egypt, into the Promised Land, the Promised Land was Egypt. We know that. Archaeological records are very clear. The Egyptians were avid bureaucrats even in those days and kept very scrupulous records. I think it's important for us to realize this conflict is built on a legend. It has no scientific support.

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    Lawrence Wright

    When I'm writing about complicated subjects, it usually involves a world. It could be the world of Scientology or the world of Al Qaeda, or the world of counter-terrorism.I look for emblematic beasts of burden - what I call "donkeys" - who can carry the reader through this world. They serve a different purpose. Donkeys are not especially interesting or likeable, but they are serviceable. They will take you into this world. The distinction I'm trying to make is: It's not about them. It's about the world.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Lawrence Wright

    An eccentric feature of the new gun laws is that people entering the state capitol can skip the long lines of tourists waiting to pass through metal detectors if they show the guards a license-to-carry permit. In other words, the people most likely to bring weapons into the building aren't scanned at all. Many of the people who breeze through are lawmakers or staffers who actually do tote concealed weapons into the offices and onto the floor of the legislature. But some lobbyists and reporters have also obtained gun licenses just to skirt the lines. I'm one of those people.

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    Lawrence Wright

    I'm in a group that puts up statues in Austin, and our most recent work was a bronze Willie, holding Trigger, that now graces the entry to the Austin City Limits studio. I got to pose for that statue, holding a Martin guitar of the same model, N-20. Clete Shields, of Philadelphia, was our sculptor. In 2011, when the statue was cast and delivered to Austin, we covered it with a parachute and stored it in a movie studio until it could be installed. One night, Willie came by for a private unveiling. He was gracious but a little overwhelmed as he exchanged a long look with himself. Bill Wittliff, who is on our committee, explained that what we liked about this piece was its engagement with the audience. "People will come to you," he said. "Little children will touch your knee and seek your counsel." "Do what I say and not what I do," Willie advised.

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    Lawrence Wright

    In Austin, we don't have such high expectations of chihuahuas.

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    Lawrence Wright

    Science fiction invites the writer to grandly explore alternative worlds and pose questions about meaning and destiny. Inventing plausible new realities is what the genre is all about. One starts from a hypothesis and then builds out the logic, adding detail and incident to give substance to imaginary structures. In that respect, science fiction and theology have much in common.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Lawrence Wright

    The only thing they had in common was the grandeur of their vision.

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    Lawrence Wright

    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.

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    Lawrence Wright

    The Trade Center dead formed a kind of universal parliament.

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    Lawrence Wright

    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.

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    Lawrence Wright

    With more than a million Texans licensed to carry handguns, the state is actually far behind Florida, with 1.7 million. "I'm EMBARRASSED," Governor Greg Abbott tweeted in 2015; "Texas #2 in nation for new gun purchases, behind CALIFORNIA. Let's pick up the pace Texans. @NRA