Inside Scientology Quotes

“It's very, very subtle stuff, changing words and giving them a whole different meaning—it creates an artificial reality," said Walter. "What happens is this new linguistic system undermines your ability to even monitor your own thoughts because nothing means what it used to mean. I couldn't believe that I could get taken over like that. I was the most independent-minded idiot that ever walked the planet. But that's what happened.”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

“The real and, to me, inexcusable danger in Dianetics lies in its conception of the amoral, detached, 100 per cent efficient mechanical man—superbly free-floating, unemotional, and unrelated to anything. This is the authoritarian dream, a population of zombies, free to be manipulated by the great brains of the founder, the leader of the inner manipulative clique.”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

“Virtually every meeting with Miscavige involved an element of fear: the initial summons required that those called to it drop whatever they were doing and sprint to the assignation place; there they would wait until the leader, who'd often be playing Nintendo in his private lounge, decided to show up.”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

“But rather than indoctrinate them more deeply, Donna Henderson, a plainspoken woman, said the Sea Org experience served to "wake us up." Public members, and notably those who've paid enough to become Operating Thetans, are assiduously kept in the dark about how the Sea Org, and the overall church hierarchy, actually functions. "You truly have no idea that things are as bad as they are within the organization," said Donna. "But once you're in, it's like the curtain just drops, and all of a sudden there's absolutely no pretense. You're not there to save the planet, you're not there to help anybody—you're there to get money from people. And you don't have money anymore, so you're a slave.”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

“Now, Kendra realized, leaving Scientology was about much more than simply deciding not go to church or use language developed by L. Ron Hubbard. It was about learning to live in a world that hadn't in some way been designed by L. Ron Hubbard.”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

“A truly Suppressive Person or Group has no rights of any kind, and actions taken against them are not punishable," Hubbard wrote. He later explained that such enemies "may be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed.”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

“No longer was a defection, a leaked document, or some other treasonous act a prerequisite for being deemed an SP, though only serious offenses like those would seem to merit such severe condemnation. It meant, after all, expulsion from the church and the loss of salvation—a severe penalty. But now anyone who expressed even the smallest criticism of church policy or leadership was in danger of being cast out.”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

“Scientology, a fundamentally narcissistic philosophy that demonizes doubt and insecurity as products of the "reactive mind," is a belief system tailor-made for actors. The Training Routines that are part of early Scientology indoctrination have been compared to acting exercises: students are taught to "duplicate," or mirror, a partner's actions; project their "intention," or thoughts, onto inanimate objects; experiment with vocal tones, the most dominant being a commanding bark known as "tone 40"; and deepen their ability to "be in their bodies" without reacting to outside stimuli. In auditing, Scientologists re-create scenes from past lives. Some processes focus directly on members "mocking up," or visualizing themselves, in different scenarios.”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

“wrote Milton Sapirstein in an essay printed in August 1950 in The Nation. “The real and, to me, inexcusable danger in Dianetics lies in its conception of the amoral, detached, 100 per cent efficient mechanical man—superbly free-floating, unemotional, and unrelated to anything. This is the authoritarian dream, a population of zombies, free to be manipulated by the great brains of the founder, the leader of the inner manipulative clique.”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

“By the early summer of 1968, many of the hippies in the Sierra Madre Canyon were into Scientology. Either that, or they were into hard drugs. It was a fractured, confusing, disheartening time: in April, Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, followed two months later by Robert Kennedy. Riots had erupted in Watts, and then at the Chicago Democratic Convention. The anti-war protests, bloody and embattled, now seemed futile. Increasingly, many young searchers who’d drifted to the Canyon, particularly those just back from Vietnam, were using heroin. Shady characters followed them, hanging around on the fringes, dealing drugs. The scene in the Canyon became increasingly tense. After one young man was killed in a gunfight near his house, Jeff Hawkins decided it was time to move on.”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

“This, unlike the Dianazene raid, received significant press attention both in the United States and throughout the English-speaking world. In Victoria, Australia, the FDA’s action added fuel to a debate that had been raging for some time over Scientology’s physical and mental health benefits. As early as 1960, the Australian Medical Association and its Mental Health Authority had taken a keen interest in Scientology, and a formal board of inquiry would ultimately produce a scathing, 173-page report thoroughly denouncing Scientology and its founder. “If there should be detected in this report a note of unrelieved denunciation of Scientology, it is because the evidence has shown its theories to be fantastic and impossible, its principles perverted and ill-founded, and its techniques debased and harmful,” the report concluded. “Scientology is a delusional belief system, based on fiction and fallacies and propagated by falsehood and deception . . . Its founder, with the merest smattering of knowledge in various sciences, has built upon the scintilla of his learning a crazy and dangerous edifice.”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

“Numerous new philosophies were born and sold during the mid-twentieth century in the United States, many of them led by charismatic leaders who promised scientifically guaranteed remedies for everything from sickness to unemployment. With the exception of a few—Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, the Reverend Billy Graham—most of those prophets have long since been forgotten, along with their techniques. So why did L. Ron Hubbard’s creed continue to exist, and to grow, well into the 1960s and beyond? Perhaps the easiest answer would be the singular force that was L. Ron Hubbard himself.”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

“People don’t “believe” in Scientology; they buy into it.”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

“After drugs comes Scientology,”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

“In 1946, Veterans Administration hospitals had some forty-four thousand patients with mental disorders. By 1950, half a million people were being treated in U.S. mental institutions, a number that would increase dramatically by the middle part of the decade, when psychiatric patients were said to account for more beds than any other type of patient”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

“Suppressive”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

“Mary Sue Hubbard lost her final appeal, and in January 1983, she was sent to a federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky. By”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

“Operation Snow White.”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

“Metteya,”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

“Selling religion was by no means unique to Scientology. The Hare Krishnas sold copies of the Bhagavad Gita; the”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

“Thelema”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

“plowed into a fence. But it was a”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

“What unites all of these individual Scientologists is a belief in their inherent spiritual imperfection, which can be rectified—if not totally reversed—only through intense study of, and rigid adherence to, the teachings of a single man: Scientology’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard. Though he has been dead some twenty years, Hubbard’s followers regard him as a living, vital entity—a personal Jesus of sorts.”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

“The traditional religious bedrock—worship, God, love and compassion, even the very concept of faith—is wholly absent from its precepts. And, unique among modern religions, Scientology charges members for every service, book, and course offered, promising greater and greater spiritual enlightenment with every dollar spent. People don’t “believe” in Scientology; they buy into it.”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

“Scientology, as its critics point out, is unlike any other Western religion in that it withholds key aspects of its central theology from all but its most exalted followers. This would be akin to the Catholic Church telling only a select number of the faithful that Jesus Christ died for their sins.”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

“Hubbard admitted it: “I’m drinking lots of rum and popping pinks and greys.”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

“In 1958 the FDA confiscated, and then destroyed, a shipment of twenty-one thousand Dianazene tablets, which Hubbard was selling as a substance that prevented radiation sickness.”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

“Having come up with the idea that thetans could move objects with their minds, Hubbard and some of his acolytes sat around the kitchen table, trying to remove the cellophane from a cigarette package by using their “intention beams.”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

“Thetans, Hubbard explained, existed long before the beginning of time and had drifted through the eons, picking up and then discarding physical bodies as if they were temporary shells. Bored, they created the universe. But after a while, they got trapped in that creation. During the lengthy course of their history, which Hubbard called the “whole track,” they had been implanted, through electric shock, pain, or hypnotic suggestion, with a host of ideas, some positive, like love, and others contradictory or negative—such as the ideas of God, Satan, Jesus Christ, and political or bureaucratic government. Eventually they came to believe themselves to be no more than the bodies they inhabited—Hubbard called them “theta beings”—and their original power was lost.”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion