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

“One of the peculiar realities of conspiracism is that people who believe in conspiracy theories rarely ever believe just one; most conspiracy theories are interconnected by the nature of their afactual grounding, and often this forms a web of theories that lead to radicalization. This is why anti-vaxxers’ conspiracies coalesced so seamlessly with far-right extremist movements in COVID denialism, and moreover why that commingling became a global phenomenon.”
― David Neiwert, The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right's Assault on American Democracy

“If the media reports it and says it is a conspiracy. Then that is where you need to look and focus on. They are covering it up because they are also part of that conspiracy. The media is very good in distorting the truth and saying it is a conspiracy. The media is always the enemy of the people. It is never for the people. It is always against the people. It is a tool used by the rich to capture and control the masses.”
― De philosopher DJ Kyos

“Kindness is braver than cruelty,
Reason is braver than conspiracy.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sapionova: 200 Limericks for Students

“Naskaristan, The Sonnet

Where no one cries of hunger,
For neighbor comes before netflix,
No one needs bulletproof backpacks,
For children come before profits,

Where women can pursue their dreams,
Without being castrated by masculinity,
Where a mother can feed her child,
Without attracting prehistoric insecurity,

Where love isn't chained to archaic texts,
For reform triumphs over rigidity,
Where all colors make the rainbow of life,
For life isn't chained to no ideology,

Where reason outshines all superstition,
Heartland beyond hateland is Naskaristan.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Insan Himalayanoğlu: It's Time to Defect

“They all fundamentally dwell in the same alternative universe—a semi-functioning epistemological bubble composed of misinformation and disinformation and fabulist conspiracy theories leavened with a few grossly distorted facts, which I have elsewhere named Alt-America. They occupy varying zones of this universe, meaning that they differ at times on the details and emphasis, but are united in the essential view that the world—its politics, its media, its cultures—are being deviously manipulated by the same cabal that brought down Trump to impose their “New World Order” enslavement on us all.”
― David Neiwert, The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right's Assault on American Democracy

“Over the course of his political career, Donald Trump perfected a three-step tango with the radical right—a dance in which he’d pull them close in an embrace, spin away while staying connected, and then pull them back to close quarters. Acknowledge, deny, validate. Lather, rinse, repeat….It was a dance that enabled Trump to court and embrace the radical right with a wink and a nod while maintaining a plausible deniability that he supported them. All of them, Trump and extremists alike, were united in their shared reality: the alternative universe of right-wing conspiracism, founded on the essential belief that the world is being secretly controlled by a cabal of elite “globalists” whose agenda is to place the world, America particularly, under their totalitarian control.”
― David Neiwert, The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right's Assault on American Democracy

“The 2020 election was the turning point for America’s epistemological crisis: the moment when the growing divide between people who believed in the old shared reality—based on reported facts and traditional authorities and institutions—and the people who believed in the new, alternative shared reality—the one concocted by Trump and the right-wing media ecosystem based on conspiracy theories, disinformation, wild conjecture, and flat-out falsehoods—became finally irreconcilable.”
― David Neiwert, The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right's Assault on American Democracy

“A central feature of the spread of far-right politics is the intimidation directed at mainstream liberals and even Republicans who refuse to participate in their incoherent conspiracism: As with all authoritarian movements, aggression directed at anyone who fails to submit to their rule is a foundational component of their real-world behavior. And in the rural areas where their politics already dominate, they often have free rein to threaten their neighbors with impunity.”
― David Neiwert, The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right's Assault on American Democracy

“Myths are healthy for creativity,
If you can tell myths from reality.
Imagination is almost a superpower,
If you can wield it without conspiracy.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Tum Dunya Tek Millet: Greatest Country on Earth is Earth

“I am a “conspiracy theorist.” I believe men and women of wealth and power conspire.

If you don’t think so, then you are what is called “an idiot.”

If you believe stuff but fear the label, you are what is called “a coward.”
― Dave Collum, Professor, Cornell University

“On the social-media platform Twitter, fake-news stories propagate “farther, faster, deeper and more broadly” than true stories. False stories reached more people, jumped from more users, had greater success going viral, and were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than were true stories. Those who primarily consume news online are more likely to believe in 9/11 conspiracy theories. This is a concern because 80 percent of internet users search for health information online.”
― Jonathan M. Berman, Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement

“… as of 2008 over half of the search results returned for “vaccine safety” and “vaccine danger” were inaccurate. About one-quarter of these websites aspire to claims of authority by imitating those of official organizations or by citing dubious literature, and many frame vaccination as a “debate” occurring within the medical community and offer “unbiased” information.”
― Jonathan M. Berman, Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement

“The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. —Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics”
― Jonathan M. Berman, Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement

“The rules were simple, as far as I could tell. Being correct had nothing to do with substance and everything to do with style. The correct answer was a matter of yelling loudly. Whoever yelled the loudest was telling the greatest version of the truth. The title of the show was Objectivity.”
― Joshua Krook, Black Friday 2050: The powerful psychological thriller set in a terrifying high-tech future

“Truth is electrifying,
Lies are tiresome.
Love is life-defining,
Hate is burdensome.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets

“Dear John Twitter
(Delete Twitter Sonnet)

For a long time I've been
backin' away from twitter,
but I didn't cut tie completely
hoping that it might get better.

Now that a far right billionaire baboon
has turned it into the internet sewer,
there's no point to hanging on to filth,
twitter used to be relevant, but no longer.

From time to time, colonial morons try to
bring back the good ol' days of segregation.
It's up to the human society to take charge,
and castrate their ambition through isolation.

Quarantine rabid dogs by absolute dissociation,
To entertain filth is to perpetrate uncivilization.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Divine Refugee

“Now that a far right billionaire baboon
has turned it into the internet sewer,
there’s no point to hanging on to filth,
twitter used to be relevant, but no longer.

From time to time, colonial morons try to
bring back the good ol’ days of segregation.
It’s up to the human society to take charge,
and castrate their ambition through isolation.

Quarantine rabid dogs by absolute dissociation,
To entertain filth is to perpetrate uncivilization.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Divine Refugee

“How could I ever have doubted that the Holocaust - the systematic murder of millions of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and trade unionists - happened? Simply, because I needed to. If you wanted to (dis)believe something in it, eventually you will.”
― Matthew Collins, HATE: My Life In The British Far Right

“Humanovator (The Sonnet)

Chatgpt pampers plagiarism,
Facebook pampers conspiracy.
More and more innovations are
becoming catalyst of catastrophe.

Note, I didn't mention the birdie,
Very mindful, very demure.
Facebook can still be repaired,
but once a MAGA, always a sewer.

Innovation that outlives its usefulness,
is no longer innovation but carnivoration.
Innovators not in touch with soil-n-roots,
are predators of the concrete jungle.

The golden age of startups is behind us,
today it's mostly filth, fraud and smut.
Amidst the crowd of trust fund termites,
be the humanovator to humanize the world.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Divine Refugee

“Chatgpt pampers plagiarism,
Facebook pampers conspiracy.
More and more innovations are
becoming catalyst of catastrophe.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Divine Refugee