Quotes from Lawrence Wright

Al-Qaeda was conceived in the marriage of these assumptions: Faith is stronger than weapons or nations, and the ticket to enter the sacred zone where such miracles occur is the willingness to die.

As it turned out, the canister was filled with a substance called red mercury—also known as cinnabar—that physically resembles uranium oxide although chemically it is quite different. Red mercury has been used in nuclear scams for more than twenty-five years.

Bin Laden señalaba..«¿Cómo podéis pedirle a la gente que ahorre energía cuando todo el mundo puede ver vuestros espléndidos palacios iluminados noche y día? —preguntaba—. ¿No tenemos derecho a preguntaros, oh rey, adónde ha ido a parar todo el dinero? No os molestéis en responder: todos saben cuántos sobornos y comisiones han acabado en vuestros bolsillos.»

Perhaps the generation that will genuinely transform the Arab world has not yet arrived.

From the beginning of al-Qaeda, there were reformers and there were nihilists. The dynamic between them was irreconcilable and self-destructive, but events were moving so quickly that it was almost impossible to tell the philosophers from the sociopaths. They were glued together by the charismatic personality of Osama bin Laden, which contained both strands—idealism and nihilism—in a potent mix.

There in the course of one hour, a little elderly woman who embodied the spirit of nonviolence single-handedly prevented loss of life, and a preppie young man with fast fists flying also prevented violence. I would not presume to judge who was doing the will of God on that snowy February afternoon.

self-referential semantic labyrinth.

That's what the movement was all about. It was not to destroy anyone. It was to redeem, to save, to convert. It was to change people's attitudes, their positions, their hearts. That's what Dr. King spoke of—redeeming the soul of America, creating the beloved community.

According to the Taliban penal code, "unclean" things were banned—an all-purpose category that included pork, pig, pig oil, anything made from human hair, satellite dishes, cinematography, any equipment that produces the joy of music, pool tables, chess, masks, alcohol, tapes, computers, VCRs, televisions, anything that propagates sex and is full of music, wine, lobster, nail polish, firecrackers, statues, sewing catalogues, pictures, Christmas cards.

shapes thinking, creating mental habits, which can

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.

In recoiling from its own extremist past, Germany inadvertently became the host of a new totalitarian movement.

but a powerful current of anger was also directed toward the West, which they saw as an enabling force behind the repressive regime.

al-Qaidas ledare utarbetade en författning och förordningar, som beskrev organisationens utopiska målsättning i tydliga ordalag: Att upprätta sanningen, utplåna ondskan och upprätta en islamsk nation.

The same year Qutb was hanged, Zawahiri helped to form an underground militant cell dedicated to replacing the secular Egyptian government with an Islamic one. He was fifteen years old.

Reverence for Life," he wrote. Ethics, Schweitzer decided, was nothing more than that. "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.

Habitually, and perhaps unconsciously, Hubbard would fill this gap—between reality and his interpretation of it—with mythology. This was the source of what some call his genius and others call his insanity. WHEN

The Soviets had lost fifteen thousand lives and suffered more than thirty thousand casualties. Between a million and two million Afghans perished, perhaps 90 percent of them civilians. Villages were razed, crops and livestock destroyed, the landscape studded with mines. A third of the population sheltered in refugee camps in Pakistan or Iran.

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 deisre to do good and live meaningful lives.

thousand words of fiction a month. He was writing

Belief in the irrational is one definition of faith, but it is also true that clinging to absurd or disputed doctrines binds a community of faith together and defines a barrier to the outside world.

There were reasons for the cover-up of SARS, including the fear, typical of repressive systems, of passing bad news up the ranks; a tangled bureaucracy; and the singular priority of economic growth over all other considerations; but the naked fact stood that the Chinese government was willing to sacrifice its own people and place the entire world in jeopardy, risking millions of lives, simply to avoid accountability for the outbreak.

En las reuniones sociales abundaban las charlas superficiales. La gente llenaba los museos y las salas de conciertos, pero no acudían allí para ver y oír, sino más bien impulsados por una desaforada y narcisista necesidad de ser vistos y oídos.

In 1931, when Anwar was twelve, Mahatma Gandhi passed through the Suez Canal on his way to London to negotiate the fate of India. The ship stopped in Port Said, whereupon Egyptian journalists besieged the ascetic leader. The correspondent for Al-Ahram marveled that Gandhi was wearing "nothing but a scrap of cloth worth five piasters, wire rim glasses worth three piasters