Russell Miller > Quotes

“Iwould say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false.”
― Russell Miller, Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard

“her first husband was a ‘genius with a misdirected mind’.”
― Russell Miller, Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard

“If it’s not true for you, it’s not true.”
― Russell Miller, Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard

“I prefer to be noticed, some day, first for my ideas and second for my good eye . . .”
― Russell Miller, Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History

“Scientology processing, which tended to produce subservience amounting almost to mental enslavement.”
― Russell Miller, Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard

“He was a mixture of Adolf Hitler, Charlie Chaplin and Baron Munchausen. In short, he was a con man.”
― Russell Miller, Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard

“Hubbard had this incredible dynamism, a disarming, magnetic and overwhelming personality.”
― Russell Miller, Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard

“It was a philosophy which was supposedly fully expounded in Excalibur, an unpublished book Ron was first said to have written in 1938.”
― Russell Miller, Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard

“Capa left for Japan on 11 April and was delighted with the reception he received. He travelled to Kyoto, Nara, Osaka, Kobe and Amagasaki, thoroughly enjoying being in a country he described to a friend as a ‘photographer’s paradise’ and unaware that mundane events would soon interrupt his idyll.”
― Russell Miller, Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History

“In the hands of a Magnum photographer, the camera is not just an objective eye, but an instrument to enlighten and inform, a stimulating force to influence opinion and sometimes to speak for those with no voice.”
― Russell Miller, Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History

“You see,’ he tells Watson, ‘I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has difficulty in laying his hands upon it … Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
― Russell Miller, The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle: A Biography

“He liked to collect celebrities.”
― Russell Miller, Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard

“As souvenirs he carried away a Boer carbine, a band triangle, a half-knitted sock made with needles fashioned from barbed wire and a set of leg fetters.”
― Russell Miller, The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle: A Biography

“A balance must be established between these two worlds, the one inside us and the one outside us. As the result of a constant reciprocal process, both these worlds come to form a single one. And it is this world that we must communicate.”
― Russell Miller, Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History

“The newspapers at that time were quite complimentary, they viewed him as an oddball who might just have come up with something good.”
― Russell Miller, Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard

“Well, I have been to heaven… It was complete with gates, angels and plaster saints – and electronic implantation equipment.’ (L. Ron Hubbard, HCO Bulletin 11 May 1963)”
― Russell Miller, Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard

“Foolishly perhaps, but determined none the less, I have high hopes of smashing my name into history so violently that it will take a legendary form even if all books are destroyed. That goal is the real goal as far as I am concerned…”
― Russell Miller, Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard

“There are two kinds of photographers, the ones who take pictures for a magazine, and the ones who gain something by taking pictures they are interested in.”
― Russell Miller, Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History

“I believed the stories he told were true for him,”
― Russell Miller, Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard

“The problem with photography is that everybody can do it. Everybody has a camera and therefore everybody feels they can give advice.”
― Russell Miller, Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History

“What is most satisfying for a photographer,’ he noted ‘is not recognition, success and so forth. It’s communication: what you say can mean something to other people, can be of certain importance. . . The photographer’s task is not to prove anything about a human event. We’re not advertisers; we’re witnesses of the transitory.”
― Russell Miller, Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History

“People had a wonderful feeling with him of being in the presence of a great man.’[”
― Russell Miller, Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard

“Those were his exact words, “an insatiable lust for power and money”.”
― Russell Miller, Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard

“Anyone can be a photographer, even a monkey can be taught to do that, but a developer, no. It is the work of real craftsmen, exactly like an engraver, a real profession.”
― Russell Miller, Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History

“In ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’ – Conan Doyle’s favourite Sherlock Holmes story – a ‘swamp adder … the deadliest snake in India’, trained by bowls of milk and recalled by a whistle, slithers down a bell pull, kills a sleeping woman and returns to its master by climbing up the bell pull and entering the adjoining room through a ventilator. There is no such reptile as a ‘swamp adder’, there are no adders in India, snakes do not like milk, are completely deaf, and no snake could climb a bell pull.”
― Russell Miller, The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle: A Biography

“Truth is what is true for you.”
― Russell Miller, Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard

“(Holmes to Watson: ‘Work is the best antidote to sorrow’),”
― Russell Miller, The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle: A Biography

“Rogers was convinced that Parsons was trying to invoke a demon in order to despatch his rival, or harm him in some way. It clearly did not work, however, for Ron remained in the best of spirits.”
― Russell Miller, Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard

“The only way to defend anything, Hubbard wrote, was to attack.”
― Russell Miller, Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard

“The profession of photography is anti-elitist. There are very few professions where even when you are at the top, a household name, you might still be standing on a draughty street corner with your feet getting wet and cold, waiting for something to happen. At that moment you are on the same level as a homeless person, standing on a street corner, begging. In most professions, the higher up you go, the more likely you are to go around in a chauffeur-driven car.”
― Russell Miller, Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History