Top 60 Lawrence Wright Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Lawrence Wright

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

— Lawrence Wright

3. “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.”

— Lawrence Wright

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

— Lawrence Wright

5. “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

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

— Lawrence Wright

7. “Those laboratory animals have done us no harm. They are tortured and murdered in the name of science. I know, I used to do it myself to my great shame. Is the benefit to humanity worth the sacrifice of so many animal lives? I say, No.”

— Lawrence Wright

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

— Lawrence Wright

9. “Disease was more powerful than armies. Disease was more arbitrary than terrorism. Disease was crueler than human imagination. And yet young people like these doctors were willing to stand in the way of the most fatal force that nature has to offer.”

— Lawrence Wright

10. “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.”

— Lawrence Wright

11. “Scientologists are trained to believe that whatever happens to them is somehow their fault, so much of the discussion in the Hole centered on what they had done to deserve this fate. The possibility that the leader of the church might be irrational or even insane was so taboo that no one could even think it, much less voice it aloud.”

— Lawrence Wright

12. “In every generation until mine, most of humanity lived with the night sky. As people began moving into cities and using more illumination, the sky gradually disappeared. There must be a corresponding loss of wonder without the stars to remind us where we stand in creation.”

— Lawrence Wright

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

— Lawrence Wright

14. “I like the serendipitous surprises of reality.”

— Lawrence Wright

15. “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

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

— Lawrence Wright

17. “Christianity would be powerless to block this trend because it exists only in the realm of the spirit – “like a vision in a pure ideal world.” Islam, on the other hand, is “a complete system” with laws, social codes, economic rules, and its own method of government. Only Islam offered a formula for creating a just and godly society. Thus.”

— Lawrence Wright

18. “Reverence for Life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting and enhancing life, and that to destroy, to harm or to hinder life is evil.”

— Lawrence Wright

19. “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

20. “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

21. “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

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

— Lawrence Wright

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

— Lawrence Wright

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

— Lawrence Wright

25. “The Trade Center dead formed a kind of universal parliament.”

— Lawrence Wright

26. “IRS is very poorly equipped to make a distinction between what is a religion and what is not.”

— Lawrence Wright

27. “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

28. “He believed the definite loss of freedom was worse than the possible loss of life.”

— Lawrence Wright

29. “The world was on the verge of a major pandemic of terrible lethality.”

— Lawrence Wright

30. “Scientology is probably the most stigmatized religion in America already.”

— Lawrence Wright

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

— Lawrence Wright

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

— Lawrence Wright

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

— Lawrence Wright

34. “I don’t want to constantly be writing about terrorism and strife.”

— Lawrence Wright

35. “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

36. “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

37. “I get very antsy when I’m not occupied.”

— Lawrence Wright

38. “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

39. “Success in the pulps depended on speed and imagination, and Hubbard had both in abundance. The church estimates that between 1934 and 1936, he was turning out a hundred thousand words of fiction a month. He was writing so fast that he began typing on a roll of butcher paper to save time. When a story was finished, he would tear off the sheet using a T-square and mail it to the publisher.”

— Lawrence Wright

40. “You can’t tell a story linearly if you want people to understand.”

— Lawrence Wright

41. “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

42. “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

43. “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.”

— Lawrence Wright

44. “The church claims that the document is a forgery.”

— Lawrence Wright

45. “How inadequate we are in our attempts to bring nature under our control, Henry thought. How careless of us to believe that we can manipulate diseases to kill, rather than to cure. We’re like schoolchildren playing with matches. One day we’ll burn the house down.”

— Lawrence Wright

46. “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

47. “Radicalism usually prospers in the gap between rising expectations and declining opportunities.”

— Lawrence Wright

48. “If peace was really within reach wasn’t it immoral to fail?”

— Lawrence Wright

49. “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.”

— Lawrence Wright

50. “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