138 Quotes by Lawrence Wright

Dianetics, Hayakawa noted, was neither science nor fiction, but something else: “fictional science.

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.

Religion is always an irrational enterprise, no matter how ennobling it may be to the human spirit.

The main object of the Islamists’ struggle was to impose Islamic law – Sharia. They believe that the five hundred Quranic verses that constitute the basis of Sharia are the immutable commandments of God, offering a road back to the perfected era of the Prophet and his immediate successors – although the legal code actually evolved several centuries after the Prophet’s death.

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

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.

The trouble with China is, there are too many chinks here.

Chaos and barbarism, which always threatened to overwhelm the movement, sharply increased as bin Laden took the helm.

Americans already believed Carter was wasting too much time on the Middle East when there were more pressing problems at home. The country was experiencing double-digit inflation coupled with high unemployment and anemic growth – a confounding phenomenon tagged “stagflation.” As for the president’s job performance, the two dreaded lines on the graph finally crossed in the spring of 1978, with more Americans disapproving.