Quote of the Day

After so many years of following Scientology's rules with the goal of reaching enlightenment, I experienced a realization so difficult to swallow that it was staggering.  I was nothing but a shell -- a brittle, hard shell -- of a person.  Appearances can be so deceiving.  From the outside, I looked pretty good.  I worked hard.  I was financially successful.  I devoted myself to the church.  I sold my religion to anyone who was willing to bite.  It will fulfill you like nothing else you have ever known!  I would say.  Yet there was nothing inside of me.  Nothing.  I was taught to feel nothing.  By conforming, by doing what others did merely because they did it, I had paved the way, in the words of Virginia Woolf, for a lethargy that "steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul."  I had become "all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent."

-- Michelle LeClair, Perfectly Clear, p. 278

Quote of the Day

By walking away from the church, I turned my back on an entire life -- friendships and associations that were decades old.  In doing so, I also rejected the ethical foundation that had guided my life.  I was a ship unmoored.  My entire adult existence was founded on the guidelines of Scientology.  I thought I was progressing toward a higher state of being.  I believed that the church was a righteous force in society.  We were going to save the world!  Then it was gone.  All of it.  My beliefs.  My values.  My purpose.  I had to figure out which parts of me were my brainwashed self and what was authentic.  Who was I?  And who did I want to be?  The questions both excited and angered me.  Excited because I could finally explore thoughts and feelings that had been asleep for more than twenty years.  Angry because I had allowed myself to be conned by a so-called religion based on science fiction, absurdities and deception.

-- Michelle LeClair, Perfectly Clear, p. 277

Quote of the Day

Silence requires the maintenance of an inner life.

-- Michelle LeClair, Perfectly Clear, p. 275

Quote of the Day

We cannot see our reflection in running water.  It is only in still water that we can see.

-- Chinese proverb

Quote of the Day

An ethics officer brought (my mom) a copy of the church's "Disconnection Policy" (which it claims doesn't exist).  She already knew what it said: Members who associate with "enemies" of the church risk being declared enemies themselves unless they "disconnected."  The ethics officer told my mother that if she stayed connected to me, she would be banished from the church and lose her chance for immortality.

-- Michelle LeClair, Perfectly Clear, p. 256-257

Quote of the Day

That day, I'd given my mother a smartphone.  At first she said no -- as a [Scientology] Sea Org member, she was forbidden to have her own phone -- but she finally accepted it.  She kept the phone hidden, but every chance she got she used it to search the Internet for information about the things I'd been telling her.  Reading the claims of ex-communicants about vendettas by the church, she recognized a pattern.  Their stories were chillingly similar to what was happening to me.

-- Michelle LeClair, Perfectly Clear, p. 256

Quote of the Day

Mom had doubted me for the longest time, but then she began asking herself: Might she be blind to what was happening?  She had been with the church for twenty-six years.  Was everything she thought colored by her bubblelike existence?  Perhaps she didn't even know how to think for herself anymore.  But the idea that she could be so wrong frightened her, so she wavered for a while.

-- Michelle LeClair, Perfectly Clear, p. 255-256

Quote of the Day

I repeatedly begged my mother to leave the church, to see that all my misfortune began when I came out as gay, that the church was persecuting me for it.  For more than two years, she had repeatedly appealed to the church for ways to help me, but all she'd received were more probing questions about me and my life.  What was I doing?  Who was I with?  How was my business?  What kind of income was I bringing in?  Could she get me to make another donation?  Tell us more about this woman she's with.  She had always answered their questions, trusting the church's word that they were only asking so they could help me.  Whenever my mother tried convincing me that they were asking out of concern, I pleaded with her to open her eyes.  The church had no intention of helping me.  My fellow Scientologists -- the people I had been taught to trust blindly -- were trolling for information to hurt me.

-- Michelle LeClair, Perfectly Clear, p. 255

Quote of the Day

I would reteach myself how to be the person I was before the church infiltrated the mind of a vulnerable young girl and then systematically and subliminally indoctrinated her into the warped imaginings of L. Ron Hubbard.  They can take away all of my belongings, I told myself.  They can ruin my business.  But they cannot destroy who I am.  Or whom I love.

-- Michelle LeClair, Perfectly Clear, p. 252

Quote of the Day

The fog in my brain had finally completely lifted.  I finally understood, completely and without a doubt, that my so-called religion was a cult.  For the first time in years, emotions I had been taught to ignore spilled over.  Sometimes I felt like a fool for having been so blind, and for so long.  I was furious over the church's betrayal -- of me and so many other believers -- and fearful of what lay ahead.  I was overwhelmed by remorse about people I had hurt along the way because of my twisted religious beliefs.  Sometimes my regrets hung over me like a storm cloud and I couldn't see the light that another day could bring, but then I would remind myself that I was a victim, like so many others, of a calculated scam called Scientology.

-- Michelle LeClair, Perfectly Clear, p. 252

Quote of the Day

Scientology had unwritten directives that were passed down through the ranks by word of mouth -- usually by auditors and ethics officers.  One was that we were "strongly advised" to avoid the news because the church was never given a fair shake.  Translation: Don't do it.  We were taught to believe that everything written by journalists was fraught with misrepresentations and lies.  News sites were blocked on all church computers.  We were told that whatever "news" we wanted could be provided by the church; all we needed to do was ask.  Everyone I knew abided by the rule -- or at least said they did.

-- Michelle LeClair, Perfectly Clear, p. 46

Quote of the Day

... dispensing praise was a key component of Scientology's methodology for luring new members.  They build you up to hook you, then tear you down in order to take control of your life and convince you that you need the church in order to excel and achieve what the church calls "true spiritual enlightenment and freedom."

-- Michelle LeClair, Perfectly Clear, p. 22

Quote of the Day

Y'know, your children deserve your attention and that's the purest way to love them.  Because attention is not dictation.  There's a point in which you only pay attention to your children; you're not instructing them anymore.  And that makes sense to me as a parent and a child.

-- Stephen Colbert, "The Triumph of Stephen Colbert"

Quote of the Day

Capitalism is a remarkable tool for generating mass wealth, but the moment you mistake it for a structure that can deliver a just and coherent society, you're an idiot.

-- David Simon, "The Last Word"

Quote of the Day

As a Catholic, I was taught that the worst thing was heresy because not only are you sinning, you're also dragging somebody else into your sinful state.  Well, Donald Trump is a heretic against reality; he lives in this fantasy world where only his emotions count and therefore only his reality is real.  But he's also saying, "Everybody else, your reality isn't real."  And so all you have to do is go, like "Hey, [audience], you're not crazy."  That's the thesis statement [of my show].  Your reactions, your emotions are valid -- you actually feel that way.  The world is as you perceive it.  Don't let anybody say you're crazy.  This is not what America is meant to be about.

-- Stephen Colbert, "The Triumph of Stephen Colbert"

Quote of the Day

In his 2016 campaign, the American president used the slogan "America First," which is the name of a committee that sought to prevent the United States from opposing Nazi Germany.  

-- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, p. 123

Quote of the Day

Democracy failed in Europe in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, and it is failing not only in much of Europe but in many parts of the world today.  It is that history and experience that reveals to us the dark range of our possible futures.  A nationalist will say that "it can't happen here," which is the first step toward disaster.  A patriot says that it could happen here, but that we will stop it.

-- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, p. 114

Quote of the Day

Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others.  As the novelist Danilo Kis put it, nationalism "has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical."

-- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, p. 114

Quote of the Day

The president is a nationalist, which is not at all the same thing as a patriot.  A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tell us that we are the best.  A nationalist, "although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge," wrote [George] Orwell, tends to be "uninterested in what happens in the real world."

-- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, p. 113-114

Quote of the Day

The point is not that Russia and America must be enemies.  The point is that patriotism involves serving your own country.

-- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, p. 113

Quote of the Day

It is not patriotic to admire foreign dictators.  It is not patriotic to cultivate a relationship with Muammar Gaddafi; or to say that Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin are superior leaders.  It is not patriotic to call upon Russia to intervene in an American presidential election.  It is not patriotic to cite Russian propaganda at rallies.  It is not patriotic to share an adviser with Russian oligarchs.  It is not patriotic to solicit foreign policy advice from someone who owns shares in a Russian energy company.  It is not patriotic to read a foreign policy speech written by someone on the payroll of a Russian energy company.  It is not patriotic to appoint a national security adviser who has taken money from a Russian propaganda organ.  It is not patriotic to appoint as secretary of state an oilman with Russian financial interests who is the director of a Russian-American energy company and has received the "Order of Friendship" from Putin.

-- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, p. 112-113

Quote of the Day

What is patriotism?  Let us begin with what patriotism is not.  It is not patriotic to dodge the draft and to mock war heroes and their families.  It is not patriotic to discriminate against active-duty members of the armed forces in one's companies, or to campaign to keep disabled veterans away from one's property.  It is not patriotic to compare one's search for sexual partners in New York with the military service in Vietnam that one has dodged.  It is not patriotic to avoid paying taxes, especially when American working families do pay.  It is not patriotic to ask those working, taxpaying American families to finance one's own presidential campaign, and then spend their contributions in one's own companies.

-- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, p. 112