138 Quotes by 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.