John Sweeney > Quotes

“Back in the day, the story goes, four science fiction writers - Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert and L Ron Hubbard - were hanging out late at night in 1940 in LA, drinking and putting the world to rights. They made a bet, who could dream up the best religion? Asimov explained in a TV interview in the 1980s that it was more of a dare than a true bet, and the goal was not a religion proper but ‘who can make the best religious story.’ The results were ‘Nightfall’ by Asimov, ‘Dune’ by Herbert, ‘Job’ by Heinlein and ‘Dianetics’ by Hubbard. If the first version of the story is true, Hubbard won the bet. They”
― John Sweeney, The Church of Fear: Inside the Weird World of Scientology

“Wars are lost or won by possession of three keys: morale, logistics, leadership.”
― John Sweeney, Killer in the Kremlin

“A simple test of a civilised human being is how they describe those who have treated them badly.”
― John Sweeney, The Church of Fear: Inside the Weird World of Scientology

“In North Korea, journalism, the job of telling the stories power and money do not want told, of giving a voice to the voiceless, does not exist.”
― John Sweeney, North Korea Undercover: Inside the World's Most Secret State

“Satellite technology is a wonderful thing. From space, we can stare down and look at perimeter fences, huts, mine entrances and even sites of mass graves.”
― John Sweeney, North Korea Undercover: Inside the World's Most Secret State

“Putin is a rational actor inside a bunker, so deep, so deprived of light and information, that he is pulling levers without understanding how the modern world is responding, without understanding that some of his levers at least are no longer working, without understanding that invading countries at peace is what the Nazis did.”
― John Sweeney, Killer in the Kremlin

“album sleeve, black, with a black triangle, from which flowed a narrow rainbow of light. Zeke”
― John Sweeney, Cold

“I am a sixty-three-year-old war reporter. I have covered wars and madness in Rwanda, Burundi, apartheid South Africa, the Romanian revolution, former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria, Albania, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Zimbabwe. I have seen babies with hacked limbs and an old man with his eyes blown in by an artillery shell and people with their lungs sucked inside out and a man with his brain sliced with a machete – and there is nothing worse than watching kids smile in war, watching the aristocracy of the human soul. It makes me cry – and cry I do.”
― John Sweeney, Killer in the Kremlin

“Restless, he begs for storms, As though in storms there is rest.”
― John Sweeney, Cold

“When religion becomes organised, man ceases to be free. It is not God that is worshipped but the group or authority that claims to speak in His name. Sin becomes disobedience to authority and not violation of integrity.”
― John Sweeney, The Church of Fear: The True Story of a Journalist's Epic Clash with the Church of Scientology

“Like Hitler in 1923, Putin from 1991 onwards breathed a poisonous fiction, that his country had been wronged, that it ‘had been stabbed in the back’. In truth, it fell apart because it had been wrong, it had stabbed itself in the front, three times over.”
― John Sweeney, Killer in the Kremlin

“Graeme Wood’s magisterial article ‘What Is The Islamic State?’ in The Atlantic, March 2015.”
― John Sweeney, Road

“My friend Oz Katerji once saw a great line of graffiti in Beirut that can work for every war reporter in every war: ‘I don’t believe in anything. I am just here for the violence.”
― John Sweeney, Killer in the Kremlin

“Over Emily’s grave, Peach said the Lord’s Prayer in a”
― John Sweeney, Elephant Moon

“He hadn’t finished: ‘Let us bring down our righteous anger against the festering scum who by their cowardice and sloth have reduced the British Empire to a moribund thing, in peril of annihilation.’ How they roared their hate!”
― John Sweeney, Elephant Moon

“Rather, Putin cherry-picked a series of ideas that coalesced together and became his guiding star: ultra-nationalism; hatred of the other; contempt for a free press and free speech; intolerance of mockery and humour; profoundly conservative social values; an unfree market in hock to political power; a reverence for ‘the organs’, the KGB and its alphabetic spaghetti predecessors (Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKGB, NKVD, MGB) and offshoots (SVR, FSB). Without articulating it, with no announcement, Putin was a Russian fascist.”
― John Sweeney, Killer in the Kremlin

“Bureaucratic entropy’ was”
― John Sweeney, Cold

“No, he is not mad. He is very bad. I am certain he is totally healthy. He has a very peculiar personality. Not that of a KGB officer. He’s different, sadistic, not thinking about other people, not even the Russian people, only himself. He has these predecessors like Hitler and Stalin. We can say they did bad things but that they didn’t do them because a voice told them to do it. They were evildoers. They were sadistic people. But they weren’t insane.”
― John Sweeney, Killer in the Kremlin

“gormless”
― John Sweeney, Cold

“I am naturally concerned that the Central Intelligence Agency is displeased with me. But then it is an organ of the United States, and not every judgement of that country has been for the best. Please note it was created in Anno Domini 1776. I would point out to you that my local pub, The Bear and Ragged Staff, is two centuries older than your country, and if that’s a problem for you I don’t care, and nor does my boss.”
― John Sweeney, Cold

“kind of sorcery, this, the dearth of engine roar not ten miles from the heart of the city. He fished out his phone from the pocket of his duffle coat. News about some kind of CIA man surfacing in Moscow but no emails, no texts from her. Vanessa used to tease him about how often he fiddled with this, his ‘anxiety machine’. Oh God, how he missed her beautiful contempt. Only a few days into the new year and it had no more joy than the old one. Battery almost flat, he killed the phone and turned his back on London’s distant skyline, an old, comfortable”
― John Sweeney, Cold

“And I say to myself, please, John, don’t throw up over Vladimir Putin.”
― John Sweeney, Killer in the Kremlin

“Restless, he begs for storms, As though in storms there is rest.   It”
― John Sweeney, Cold

“he executed a 360-degree turn that made him no friends,”
― John Sweeney, Road

“monologues”
― John Sweeney, Elephant Moon

“Instead, from the bowels of Stasiland, he came to internalize a dark nonsense, that his country’s collapse was due to Western trickery and domestic betrayal, rather than the simple facts that the Soviet Union had run out of cash and self-belief and purpose”
― John Sweeney, Killer in the Kremlin

“Our ignorance of history makes us slander our own times, wrote Gustave Flaubert.”
― John Sweeney, The Church of Fear: Inside the Weird World of Scientology