Going Clear Quotes

“Religion is always an irrational enterprise, no matter how ennobling it may be to the human spirit.”
― Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“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, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“Science fiction invites the writer to grandly explore alternative worlds and pose questions about meaning and destiny.”
― Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“The baby boom eventually prompted Hubbard to order that no one could get pregnant without his permission; according to several Sea Org members, any woman disobeying his command would be "off-loaded" to another Scientology organization or flown to New York for an abortion.”
― Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“Dianetics, Hayakawa noted, was neither science nor fiction, but something else: “fictional science.”
― Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“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, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“VERY EARLY ONE MORNING in July 1977, the FBI, having been tipped off about Operation Snow White, carried out raids on Scientology offices in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, carting off nearly fifty thousand documents. One of the files was titled “Operation Freakout.” It concerned the treatment of Paulette Cooper, the journalist who had published an exposé of Scientology, The Scandal of Scientology, six years earlier. After having been indicted for perjury and making bomb threats against Scientology, Cooper had gone into a deep depression. She stopped eating. At one point, she weighed just eighty-three pounds. She considered suicide. Finally, she persuaded a doctor to give her sodium pentothal, or “truth serum,” and question her under the anesthesia. The government was sufficiently impressed that the prosecutor dropped the case against her, but her reputation was ruined, she was broke, and her health was uncertain. The day after the FBI raid on the Scientology headquarters, Cooper was flying back from Africa, on assignment for a travel magazine, when she read a story in the International Herald Tribune about the raid. One of the files the federal agents discovered was titled “Operation Freakout.” The goal of the operation was to get Cooper “incarcerated in a mental institution or jail.”
― Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“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, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“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, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“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, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“Hubbard mentions an organization he calls SMERSH, a name taken from James Bond novels. Hubbard describes it as a “hidden government …that aspired to world domination!” Psychiatry is the dominating force behind this sinister institution.”
― Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“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, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“The ceremony, likely aided by narcotics and hallucinogens, required Hubbard to channel the female deity of Babalon as Parsons performed the “invocation of wand with material basis on talisman”—in other words, masturbating on a piece of parchment. He typically invoked twice a night.”
― Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“Miscavige keeps a number of dogs, including five beagles. He had blue vests made up for each of them, with four stripes on the shoulder epaulets, indicating the rank of Sea Org Captain. He insists that people salute the dogs as they parade by. The dogs have a mini-treadmill where they work out.”
― Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“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, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“Testosterone blends easily with your own hormones.… You have no fear of what any woman may think of your bed conduct. You know you are a master. You know they will be thrilled. You can come many times without weariness.… Many women are not capable of pleasure in sex and anything adverse they say or do has no effect whatever upon your pleasure. You have no fear if they conceive. What if they do? You do not care. Pour it into them and let fate decide.”
― Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“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, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“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, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“The final exercise (according to documents obtained by WikiLeaks—Haggis refused to talk about it) was “Go out to a park, train station or other busy area. Practice placing an intention into individuals until you can successfully and easily place an intention into or on a Being and/or a body.”
― Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“The church claims that the document is a forgery.”
― Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“The trouble with China is, there are too many chinks here.”
― Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“Sometimes in Hubbard’s writings, however, he puts forward what appear to be fantasies of a highly schizophrenic personality. In 1952, for instance, he began talking about “injected entities,” which can paralyze portions of the anatomy or block information from being audited. These entities can be located in the body, always in the same places. For instance, one of the entities, the “crew chief,” is found on the right side of the jaw down to the shoulder. “They are the ‘mysterious voices’ in the heads of some preclears,” Hubbard said. “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, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“However, twelve former Sea Org members told me that Miscavige had assaulted them; twenty-one have told me or testified in court that they have witnessed one or more assaults on other church staff members by their leader.”
― Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“Never have I felt so keenly the danger of new religious movements and the damage that is done to people who are lured into such groups, not out of weakness in character but through their desire to do good and live meaningful lives.”
― Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“Scientology is quite likely the most ruthless, the most classically terroristic, the most litigious and the most lucrative cult the country has ever seen.”
― Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“an old Zen proverb: “When the master points at the Moon, many people never see it at all, they only look at the master.”
― Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief

“Scientology is not just a matter of belief, the recruits were constantly told; it is a step-by-step scientific process that will help you overcome your limitations and realize your full potential for greatness. Only Scientology can awaken individuals to the joyful truth of their immortal state. Only Scientology can rescue humanity from its inevitable doom. The recruits were infused with a sense of mystery, purpose, and intrigue. Life inside Scientology was just so much more compelling than life outside.”
― Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief

“The coffee is fresh-ground Starbucks, preferably a Guatemala or Arabian Mocha Java, made with distilled water, to which he adds raw sugar and half-and-half.”
― Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“The dogma of the group is promoted as scientifically incontestable—in fact, truer than anything any human being has ever experienced. Resistance is not just immoral; it is illogical and unscientific. In order to support this notion, language is constricted by what Lifton calls the “thought-terminating cliché.” “The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed,” he writes. “These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.” For instance, the Chinese Communists dismissed the quest for individual expression and the exploration of alternative ideas as examples of “bourgeois mentality.” In Scientology, terms such as “Suppressive Person” and “Potential Trouble Source” play a similar role of declaring allegiance to the group and pushing discussion off the table. The Chinese Communists divided the world into the “people” (the peasantry, the petite bourgeoisie) and the “reactionaries” or “lackeys of imperialism” (landlords and capitalists), who were essentially non-people. In a similar manner, Hubbard distinguished between Scientologists and “wogs.” The word is a derogatory artifact of British imperialism, when it was used to describe dark-skinned peoples, especially South Asians. Hubbard appropriated the slur, which he said stood for “worthy Oriental gentleman.” To him, a wog represented “a common, ordinary, run-of-the-mill, garden-variety humanoid”—an individual who is not present as a spirit. Those who are within the group are made to strive for a condition of perfection that is unattainable—the ideal Communist state, for instance, or the clearing of the planet by Scientology.”
― Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“Psychotherapy has a theoretical conclusion to it; the patient is “cured” or decides that the procedure doesn’t work for him. In either case, the revenue dries up. Religion solves that problem. In addition to tax advantages, religion supplies a commodity that is always in demand: salvation.”
― Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief