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" 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

Chaos

American

Rose

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

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

" For my parents, leaving the close social quarters of Abilene was like getting out of jail. They were not true West Texans; they had not come to love the unending monotony of mesquite barrens or the high, hot blue sky that made sunsets a matter of prayerful thankfulness. "

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

" The lovely thing about the writing life is that you can point it in any direction. "

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

" Certainly, the two things Scientology has on its side are money and lawyers, but those qualities won't save it if it can't find a way to bring new members into the fold. "

" The Middle East has been a part of my life since I was a young man, when I went to teach in Cairo. "

" The Israelis and the Palestinians don't know each other. They live right there, but they've become strangers. And it makes it much more difficult to make peace with a person you really don't know, and that's an obstacle in itself. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" A donkey is a very useful beast of burden. "

" 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. "

" It's their belief, their own will, that holds people in Scientology, even oftentimes when they have been abused. "

" 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. "

" I think the commentarian has taken over, so now what you get is a lot less reporting and more opinion. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" I was a very religious teenager, and I moved away from that. "

" The U.S. is such an unusual place in the world because you can believe anything you want. "

" To an outsider, Abilene was like a small landfall in the Sargasso Sea - remote, laconic, and forever closed to strangers. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I was in Austin on 9/11, and there were no flights, so I couldn't get to New York to cover the story, so I had to find more creative ways. "

" I spent two years in Cairo, and I felt a certain urgency about trying to understand the region and the conflict here, in the modest way that a journalist might be able to try and shed some understanding and enlightenment on a region that is profoundly conflicted, and a conflict that has real consequences for Americans. "

" 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

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