"When I heard the news that Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan, I had a lot of questions. And one of the people I wanted to talk to was Lawrence Wright. He's joined us several times on the show. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2006 book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaida and the Road to 9/11, which is based in part on more than 500 interviews, including interviews with friends and relatives of bin Laden."

Lawrence Wright Journalism See all quotes by Lawrence Wright →

React to this quote

More by Lawrence Wright

“The Looming Tower Reviews at Metacritic”

“The most worrisome development in the evolution of Al Qaeda’s influence since 9/11 is the growth of pockets of Islamist radicalism in Western populations.”

“In response to nearly a thousand queries, the Scientology delegation handed over forty-eight binders of supporting material, stretching nearly seven linear feet.”

“Lawrence Wright Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley”

“Audio of Paul Ingram Pardon Hearing”

“Listen, bin Laden is - you know, he's not irrelevant. He was important all along. Just the fact that he was able to elude capture or being killed for nearly a decade, actually more than a decade if you go back to the embassy bombings in 1998 when we first went after him. He's been a symbol of resistance and also of the failure of American policy to reach out and stop this kind of terror. It emboldened other imitators all around the globe. So getting bin Laden is immeasurably important.”

Resonant Thoughts

"The immense and uncontrollable blood-baths, the brutality with which civilian populations were massacred and women and girls were dragged into harems which to the Hindus appeared as no better than bro…"

— Wilhelm von Pochhammer

Politics1892–1982

#family

"There are significant strategic interests , and there's a lot of stuff going on that's important. Not just the United States. For example, France is doing some really vicious things there, in fact the…"

— Noam Chomsky

Philosophy1928

#justice

"But at the moment I'd like to talk about another way because this threat is with us and at the moment is more imminent. One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has …"

— Ronald Reagan

Politics1911–2004

#Human Nature

"It was not just in the Andante of the Second Quartet that I remembered having translated the distant memory of bells which in the evening at Montgauzy — and this is some time ago — came to us from a v…"

— Gabriel Fauré

Music1845–1924

#truth