Lawrence Wright Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von Lawrence Wright:

A documentary film is a great way of helping people understand because, somehow, when one is able to see the people involved, it lends a certain immediacy and understanding that is hard to get on the page.

Our intelligence community was extremely poorly prepared before 9/11.

Lawrence Wright

If you call it al-Qaida or bin Ladenism or jihadism, whatever you call it, it's proliferated.

Lawrence Wright

Every form has its merits. And I like to work in a lot of different forms.

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.

Lawrence Wright

Scientology plays an outsize role in the cast of new religions that have arisen in the 20th century and survived into the 21st.

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.

Lawrence Wright

I've always been intrigued by why people believe one thing over another.

Lawrence Wright

I like the serendipitous surprises of reality.

Lawrence Wright

A documentary film is a great way of helping people understand because, somehow, when one is able to see the people involved, it lends a certain immediacy and understanding that is hard to get on the page.

Lawrence Wright

This age of terror will end one day, but whether our society can restore the feeling of freedom that once was our birthright is hard to predict.

Lawrence Wright

I'm grateful for the ascendancy of women in business and politics, which may yet advance the humanity of those callings.

Lawrence Wright

I've always worried that one day women would figure out how to get along without us and they would be able to reproduce unilaterally, like sponges.

Lawrence Wright

What is interesting to me about film, and documentary film in particular, is that I can write about these people, and you trust my judgment, more or less, but when you're confronted yourself with humans who are right there on the screen telling you their story, you make a judgment yourself that is conclusive.

Lawrence Wright

Religions prosper in large part because of the communities that they create.

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.

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 worshiped as minor deities were in the ancient world. The idea was: if you could get them, think how many people would follow.

Lawrence Wright

Contempt for men pervades the most obscure strata of our society.

Lawrence Wright

When I was working on the al-Zawahiri piece, a large part of it published in 'The New Yorker' in 2002, I had spoken to a lot of Zawahiri's friends, people who had been in prison with him, people that had been in al-Jihad with him. And quite to my surprise, they liked that article a lot.

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.

Lawrence Wright

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

Lawrence Wright

Dallas was not a caring city, but it was efficient.

Lawrence Wright

I love apples. I actually do eat an apple a day.

Lawrence Wright

When I was in the ninth grade, I had a teacher in Dallas, Texas, named Elizabeth Enlow in English class. Every Friday, we had to write a little essay, and you had to incorporate three particular words into the story. That was the sole direction. And to me, this was so much fun.

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.

Lawrence Wright

I deplore sexual harassment.

Lawrence Wright

When you're first starting on a project, you feel shy because you don't know very much, and you know that you're going to be ignorant and seem ignorant.

Lawrence Wright

Societies that depend on natural resources tend to have certain inherent problems. The limited concentration of wealth - whether from oil, coal, diamonds, or bauxite - often leads to corruption and authoritarianism.

Lawrence Wright

The 2003 invasion of Iraq by U.S. and coalition partners stands as one of the greatest blunders in American history. The Islamic State, also known as ISIL or ISIS, rose out of the the chaos, throwing the region into turmoil that hasn't been equaled since the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Lawrence Wright

Scientology is not a terrorist organization. Scientology has used intimidating tactics and vindictive litigation.

Lawrence Wright

What I've learned is that everybody really wants to sell their story. No matter who they are, everybody feels that what they're doing is the right thing, and if they could only explain themselves to a reasonable person that understands them, then maybe they'll listen.

Lawrence Wright

You can't tell a story linearly if you want people to understand.

Lawrence Wright

Oftentimes, when I was reporting on conflict somewhere in the world or prison or wherever I might be, I'd be struck by the fact that religious beliefs were sometimes transformative, sometimes a motivation for violence.

Lawrence Wright

If you have great characters, then your reader becomes emotionally invested in those people.

Lawrence Wright

If you look at all those terrorist groups - I'm talking, going back, Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Nusra, al-Qaeda, ISIS - they're all proxy armies in an Islamic civil war.

Lawrence Wright

There are a lot of reporters who I feel are a lot more courageous and fool-hardy than I am. Maybe at the top I'd put Dexter Filkins. He's an extraordinary man in terms of his nerve and ability to get into dangerous situations and tell the story cogently. He's bringing back real human stories. I admire that.

Lawrence Wright

In places where money comes out of the ground, luck and a willingness to take risks are the main denominators that determine one's future, not talent or education or hard work. Money that is so easily acquired somehow comes to seem well deserved, because those who have it must be either uniquely perspicacious or divinely favored.

Lawrence Wright