Conspiracy Theories Quotes

“The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory.

The truth is far more frightening - Nobody is in control.

The world is rudderless.”
― Alan Moore

“The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country.”
― Daniel Patrick Moynihan

“The mentally disturbed do not employ the Principle of Scientific Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of facts. They shoot for the baroque.”
― Philip K. Dick, Valis

“History is much more the product of chaos than of conspiracy”
― Zbigniew Brzezinski

“The emotional appeal of a conspiracy theory is in its simplicity. It explains away complex phenomena, accounts for chance and accidents, offers the believer the satisfying sense of having special, privileged access to the truth. For those who become the one-party state’s gatekeepers, the repetition of these conspiracy theories also brings another reward: power.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.”
― Thomas Pynchon

“Antisemitism is unique among religious hatreds. It is a racist conspiracy theory fashioned for the needs of messianic and brutal rulers, as dictators from the Tsars to the Islamists via the Nazis have shown. Many other alleged religious 'hatreds' are not hatreds in the true sense. If I criticise Islamic, Orthodox Jewish or Catholic attitudes towards women, for instance, and I'm accused of being a bigot, I shrug and say it is not bigoted to oppose bigotry.”
― Nick Cohen

“The reason people don't buy conspiracy theories is they think 'conspiracy' means everybody's on the same program. That's not how it works. Everybody's got a different program. They just all want the same guy dead. Socrates was a gadfly, but I bet he took time out to screw somebody's wife.”
― James Lee Burke, Sunset Limited

“This brings us to the crux moment in the supposed 'Show Trial' melodrama. Employing the confusing and confused testimony of Jude Wanniski (who he also describes as a political nut-case, if not a nut-case flat-out, and to whom he introduced me in the first place) Blumenthal suggests that I concerted my testimony in advance with the House Republicans, notably James Rogan and Lindsey Graham. Feebly bridging the gap between sheer conjecture and outright conspiracy, Rogan is quoted as saying: 'Hitchens may well have called Lindsey..' I did not in fact do any such thing. Why should my denial be believed? It's not as if I care. I probably should have colluded with them, if my intention was to land a blow on Clinton (which it was) let alone to plant a Judas kiss on Blumenthal (which it was not). But every other fragment of Blumenthal's evidence and description shows—even boasts—that Congressman Graham was essentially punching air until the last day of the trial. That could not possibly have been true, especially in his cross-examination of Blumenthal, if he knew he had an ace in his vest-pocket all along. Only a tendency to paranoia or to all-explaining theories could suggest the contrary. I'd even be able to claim for myself, I hope, that if I'd truly wanted to gouge a deep or vengeful wound I could or would have made a better job of it.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“After Tony [Judt]'s death, in August 2010, I toured to discuss the book we had written together, which he had entitle 'Thinking the Twentieth Century.' I realized as I traveled around the United States that its subject had been forgotten all too well. In hotel rooms, I watched Russian television toy with the traumatic American history of race, suggesting that Barack Obama had been born in Africa. It struck me as odd that the American entertainer Donald Trump picked up the theme not long thereafter.”
― Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

“I smile, secure, knowing the best place to hide is in the light. It blinds everyone.”
― C. Fear

“Everything is a conspiracy theory when you don't know how anything works”
― Hank Green

“But no one who studies autocratic propaganda believes that fact-checking or even swift reactions are sufficient. By the time the correction is made, the falsehood has already traveled around the world. Our old models never acknowledged the truth that many people desire disinformation. They are attracted by conspiracy theories and will not necessarily seek out reliable news at all.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.

“According to Terry Nichols, that winter of 1995, in Junction City, Timothy McVeigh accidentally let slip his FBI handler’s name: “Larry Potts.” Potts, the demoted former FBI deputy director, would surely have outraged McVeigh for his prominent roles in the FBI sieges at Ruby Ridge and Waco. Potts had set the rules of engagement that led to the horrendous sniper killing of Vicki Weaver on her cabin porch in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, as she held her newborn baby in her arms. Then at Waco, Potts had toured the scene late in the FBI’s long siege and recommended the attorney general approve the deadly tear gas raid that ended the Texas standoff with scores of deaths.

“McVeigh said he believed Potts was manipulating him and forcing him to go off script, which I understood meant to change the target of the bombing,” Nichols said. “That was the only time I ever heard McVeigh refer to Larry Potts in that context.”
― Margaret Roberts, Blowback: The Untold Story of the FBI and the Oklahoma City Bombing

“The Oklahoma City bombing was an FBI PATCON plot allowed to go too far, unleashing neo-Nazi violence on hundreds of innocent citizens.”
― Margaret Roberts, Blowback: The Untold Story of the FBI and the Oklahoma City Bombing

“Eric Holder (Deputy Attorney General) and Janet Napolitano (Secretary of Homeland Security) — both of whom were knee deep in PATCON and the cover-up of the true circumstances behind the deaths of [168] men, women and children in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995.”
― Margaret Roberts, Blowback: The Untold Story of the FBI and the Oklahoma City Bombing

“For over six months the order had been publishing The Warning, an eight-page newspaper carrying lurid red headlines and poorly-drawn quarter-page cartoons, and edited by Matthew. The noble Southern working people purchased it eagerly, devouring and believing every word in it. Matthew, in 14-point, one-syllable word editorials painted terrifying pictures of the menace confronting white supremacy and the utter necessity of crushing it. Very cleverly he linked up the Pope, the Yellow Peril, the Alien Invasion and Foreign Entanglements with Black-No-More as devices of the Devil. He wrote with such blunt sincerity that sometimes he almost persuaded himself that it was all true.”
― George S. Schuyler, Black No More

“The great mass of white workers, however, was afraid to organize and fight for more pay because of a deepset fear that the Negroes would take their jobs. They had heard of black labor taking the work of white labor under the guns of white militia, and they were afraid to risk it. They had first read of the activities of Black-No-More, Incorporated, with a secret feeling akin to relief but after the orators of the Knights of Nordica and the editorials of The Warning began to portray the menace confronting them, they forgot about their economic ills and began to yell for the blood of Dr. Crookman and his associates. Why, they began to argue, one couldn't tell who was who! Herein lay the fundamental cause of all their ills. Times were hard, they reasoned, because there were so many white Negroes in their midst taking their jobs and undermining their American standard of living. None of them had ever attained an American standard of living to be sure, but that fact never occurred to any of them. So they flocked to the meetings of the Knights of Nordica and night after night sat spellbound while Rev. Givens, who had finished the eighth grade in a one-room country school, explained the laws of heredity and spoke eloquently of the growing danger of black babies.”
― George S. Schuyler, Black No More

“Empathy is overrated.”
― C. Fear, Heaven's Captives: A Psychological Horror Thriller

“The cynic is merely a cautious optimist.”
― C. Fear, Heaven's Captives: A Psychological Horror Thriller

“Always jump to collusions.”
― John Alejandro King aka The Covert Comic

“When you step back from it, you realize that the whole
idea of so many fearful conspiracies proliferating like
harmful bacteria everywhere isn’t just surreal or overkill, it’s ludicrous.”
― Sol Luckman, Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality

“All that is required for the Forces of Evil to triumph is for the Good People to do Nothing." Edmund Burke”
― Tracey Schubert

“People conspire, that's not a theory.”
― Michael Palmero

“Laken read my favorite books to feel at home. All this time, all these crippling days of doubt, and he’d sat by himself in other kingdoms reading my favorite books so he didn’t feel alone.
I bit my lips to hold back my grin. “Does this mean you want to talk about your favorite fictional conspiracy theories?”
Laken locked eyes with me. A mischievous grin made me hope he thought the same things I did, and we talked for hours. Though his theories didn’t always match up with mine, it almost felt like, dare I say it… we were friends again.”
― Taylor Epperson, Second Time's a Charm

“In maintaining a faulty, reason-based mindset,
‘truthers’ do a number of disservices to themselves, their message and their followers here in this subjective construct in which objectivity is merely a myth of overweening ‘science.”
― Sol Luckman, Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality

“Regardless of whether they desire to be of service to humanity, ‘truthers’—despite any and all metaphysical leanings—by definition succumb to a critical error that makes them part of the problem, not the solution: adherence to something ostensibly real, a ‘real truth’ in a manifestly contrived mindscape.”
― Sol Luckman, Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality

“Some said it was on the third spike, some said the fourth, but it was as impossible as finding the bloody shovel on the back of Abbey Road where all the clues proclaimed that Paul was dead”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides - Jeffrey Eugenides

“Conspiracy theories taught us to doubt the truth. Artificial intelligence is teaching us to doubt everyone, everything—and reality itself.”
― Lawrence Nault

“You know what the favorite word of a fascist is? Freedom. You know what the favorite word of a fanatic is? Tradition.

You know what the favorite word of the superstitious is? Enlightenment. You know what the favorite word of a conspiracy theorist is? Truth”
― Abhijit Naskar, Aşkoholic: Portrait of A Human