Quotes & Sayings About Conspiracy Theory

Feminism as a movement for political and social equity is important, but feminism as an academic clique committed to eccentric doctrines about human nature is not. Eliminating discrimination against women is important, but believing that women and men are born with indistinguishable minds is not. Freedom of choice is important, but ensuring that women make up exactly 50 percent of all professions is not. And eliminating sexual assaults is important, but advancing the theory that rapists are doing their part in a vast male conspiracy is not. — Steven Pinker

The ever-popular conspiracy theory. No home should be without one. — Stephen King

Rebels and dissidents challenge the complacent belief in a just world, and, as the theory would predict, they are usually denigrated for their efforts. While they are alive, they may be called 'cantankerous,' 'crazy,' 'hysterical,' 'uppity,' or 'duped.' Dead, some of them become saints and heroes, the sterling characters of history. It's a matter of proportion. One angry rebel is crazy, three is a conspiracy, 50 is a movement. — Carol Tavris

Maybe I should get a gun... — Elizabeth Horton-Newton

What do we call a story that's based on limited real data and imagined data and blended into a coherent, emotionally satisfying version of reality? A conspiracy theory. — Brene Brown

There is no public record of Barack Obama's (or Stanley Ann Dunham's) being in the CIA. Perhaps he was, perhaps he wasn't. The reader may consider the information and, based on background, life experiences, and ability to keep an open mind, may come to either conclusion.
But any explanation of why Barack Obama would not have mentioned a word of his Most Excellent Pakistani Adventure in either of his two autobiographies requires a conspiracy theory that might cast doubt on either the sanity or the sincerity fothe person proposing it. — Mondo Frazier

Say your boss has been taking longer than usual to respond to your e-mails. Many people would take that as a sign that their star is falling because if your star is falling, the chances are high that your boss will respond to your e-mails more slowly than before. But your boss might be slower in responding because she is unusually busy or her mother is ill. And so the chances that your star is falling if she is taking longer to respond are much lower than the chances that your boss will respond more slowly if your star is falling. The appeal of many conspiracy theories depends on the misunderstanding of this logic. That is, it depends on confusing the probability that a series of events would happen if it were the product of a huge conspiracy with the probability that a huge conspiracy exists if a series of events occurs. The effect on the probability that an event will occur if or given that other events occur is what Bayes's theory is all about. To — Leonard Mlodinow

The biggest thing is to create a product that consumers find useful. As more and more people like something, it becomes harder and harder to have a conspiracy theory about it. — Jeremy Stoppelman

I can't shake the feeling that all these conspiracy theorists are in on it. — Wynne McLaughlin

The use of 'conspiracy theory' as a derogatory - as an epithet almost - is something the propagandists have perfected over the decades, and it's a useful tool for eliminating articulate dissent and other points of view, and information that might be inconvenient for a policy agenda. — Chris Sanders

Not every conspiracy is a theory, — James Badge Dale

Ebola...is manufactured and purposefully mutated to cause the most harm possible... (p. 105) — Julie Rowe

One of the things that is interesting about reading conspiracy theory is that much of what folks think is conspiracy is really many people acting in concert to make or protect their money. — Catherine Austin Fitts

Bilderberg pulls the strings of every government and intelligence agency in the Western world. — James Morcan

I'd heard theories. Destruction of forests had altered pressure zones. Global warming made for stronger storms. Chemtrails indicated government manipulation of the weather. God punished the family and neighbors of idolaters. — Carl-John X. Veraja

I would not call myself a veteran conspiracy theorist. Or an obsessed one. I pretty much peaked on the whole conspiracy theory thing in the '60s, with the grassy knoll, who really killed JFK, and who ordered the hit on Lee Harvey Oswald. — Patti Davis

Bill Clinton will be our country's next President. The election later this year is just a formality. The result has already been decided. — James Morcan

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

I think that there is something that happens, a phenomenon that happens around a conspiracy theory, where if you believe in a conspiracy theory, then every critique of that theory is simply more proof that the conspiracy exists. And I think that that's something that goes on in the person of Donald Trump. — Ben Domenech

Something about his voice was familiar. — Elizabeth Horton-Newton

I just think too many nice things have happened in string theory for it to be all wrong. Humans do not understand it very well, but I just don't believe there is a big cosmic conspiracy that created this incredible thing that has nothing to do with the real world. — Edward Witten

I believe conspiracy theories are part of a larger conspiracy to distract us from the real conspiracy. String theory. — Andy Kindler

The question is: Do we have a shadow government? And if we do, who are those intelligent minority that is guiding us through? And where are they guiding us to? If you skip past all of the puppet and the strings, if you stop looking at the puppets, themselves, you have to see who's behind the puppets. Who is choosing the puppets and the players? Who's the puppet master? George Soros. Now I am sure that this will be called a conspiracy theory. And quite honestly, a year ago, two years ago, I wouldn't have believed it myself. — Glenn Beck

The Conspiracy Theory of Society ... [is] a typical result of the secularization of a religious superstition. The belief in the Homeric gods whose conspiracies explain the history of the Trojan War is gone. The gods are abandoned. But their place is filled by powerful men or groups - sinister pressure groups whose wickedness is responsible for all the evils we suffer from - such as the Learned Elders of Zion, or the monopolists, or the capitalists, or the imperialists. — Karl Popper

So how can we determine what's real and what's not? We can't. We can just pick and choose what we want to believe and rationalize it as best we can. Reality, after all, is basically a movie projected inside our heads. It's based on the colors our senses permit us to see, the sounds they permit us to hear and whatever else our brains let slip through the gates. But outside our limited senses, surrounding us, there is, unquestionably, a much greater reality, a universe we live in but cannot see. Well, most of us, anyway. Out there, in the dark, All Things Are Possible. — Richard B. Spence

A tactic used by authors of virtually every single book I've ever read that propounds a conspiracy theory is to attack an agency as being part of a conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination, but when this same agency comes up with something favorable to the author's position, the author will cite that same agency as credible support for his argument. — Vincent Bugliosi

What do you call a conspiracy theory that's backed up by evidence? Oh yes, a conspiracy — Ian Shircore

Paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer.
But he was also fond of saying, at other times, that even paranoid schizophrenics have enemies. — William Gibson

I have a tendency to often share the point of view of the conspiracy theory. — Marion Cotillard

You know, I'm not big on conspiracy theory. It does really kind of get my blood going when I find out there really are conspiracies that actually happened. — James Van Der Beek

I thought that you would be frozen in awe when you found the sequence, when you heard a bird's song repeating my Morse code, my cry for help, my S.O.S, when you saw the same numbers in the petals of a flower and the structure of a pine cone, when you saw with your own eyes the interconnectedness of all things.
But I was wrong.
You searched for a male god, a creator, an intelligent designer, or you banished the beauty and mystery of the world beneath the cold concrete grave of closed-eye skepticism. The few of you who could still hear my music felt tortured and misunderstood; you reached out for any conspiracy theory large enough to explain your alienated despair, your sense that the Earth was dying and no one cared.
But listen to me -- you are not alone. Run your fingers through the grass and grab it in your fists, feel my pulse echoing through your blood. You. Are. Not. Alone. And I -- I am not dead yet. — Sarah Warden

There is a theory going around that the U.S.A. was and still is a gigantic Masonic plot under the ultimate control of the group known as the Illuminati. It is difficult to look for long at the strange single eye crowning the pyramid which is found on every dollar bill and not begin to believe the story, a little. Too many anarchists in 19th-century Europe - Bakunin, Proudhon, Salverio Friscia - were Masons for it to be pure chance. Lovers of global conspiracy, not all of them Catholic, can count on the Masons for a few good shivers and voids when all else fails. — Thomas Pynchon

The 9/11 Commission Report is fatally flawed. The major conclusions of The 9/11 Commission Report, the official, conspiracy theory, are false. — Enver Masud

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

Up near the top, underlined and in capitals were the words: 'READ THIS.'
Jay grimaced as she wondered what she was in for. Would it be a semi-literate political rant, a half-baked conspiracy theory or a quasi-religious manifesto? Perhaps it was just a very long suicide note: a self-pitying list of misfortune and hardship. Whatever it was she doubted it would contain anything useful.
Unable to put it off any longer, she finished her coffee and began: 'We are all stories that we tell ourselves, memories selected to fit our chosen form.
What becomes of us when there is no-one there to read? — K. Valisumbra

Not to mention the fact that the belief in conspiracy theories is already a form of conspiracy theory in itself. It's to me not quite clear on what basis you would assume that one conspiracy is no conspiracy, and the others are. Capitalism drives on conspiracy theories as well: they believe in a certain power that creates a "free market" and that you can sit and grow forever on finite resources. This newspaper article obviously did not mean 'conspiracy theory' but 'urban legend', because the question if there are ufos landing on earth and whether you want to believe this seems to have little to do with conspiracy. And whether that is an urban legend worthy of belief is not undisputed. I think people who believe in such things are actually less illogical than people who believe housing associations are useful. — Martijn Benders

Most schooling is training for stupidity and conformity, and that's institutional, but occasionally you get a spark, somebody'll challenge your mind, make you think and so on, and that has a tremendous effect you just reach all sorts of people. Of course if you do it you may very have problems, you have to tread the narrow line. There are plenty of people who don't want students to think, they're afraid of the crisis of democracy. If people start thinking you get all these problems that I quoted before. They won't have enough humility to submit to a civil rule or they'll start trying to press their demands in the political arena and have ideas of their own, instead of beleiving what they're told. And privelage and power typically doesn't want that and so they react and the high school teacher that tries to get students to think may find oppression, firing and so on. — Noam Chomsky

The trouble with believing conspiracies is you start seeing them everywhere, right? And everything becomes a part of them. But, of course, the trouble with not believing them is becoming a dupe. — J. Ross Clara

To everyone except a dedicated ideologue, it was pretty obvious that we invaded Iraq not because of our love of democracy but because it's maybe the second- or third-largest source of oil in the world and is right in the middle of the major energy-producing region. You're not supposed to say this. It's considered a conspiracy theory. — Noam Chomsky

The theory for admitting accomplice testimony that is uncorroborated is that conspiracy is by its nature secretive and that only the parties to it can know it occurred. But in practice this means the accomplice's guilt is modified to the degree that he can convict the defendant. — E.L. Doctorow

The conspiracy theory of society . . . comes from abandoning God and then asking: "Who is in his place?" - Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, London, Routledge, — Umberto Eco

Paranoia has its downsides as an agency in daily life, or in the political sphere of collective action, which finds itself beset everywhere by the nightmarish influence of conspiracy thinking (they call it theory, but theories exist to be tested, and conspiracy thinking exists never to be tested, and globally ignores the results of tests imposed by others). The suspicion that malign operators are responsible for every one of the injustices and heartbreaks of existence is a consoling view, a balm to bleak glimpses of the void behind our reality. It's brave to pursue truth, and brave to pursue and expose tricky and well-hidden bad guys (Nazi doctors, Pentagon intelligence-distorters, etc.). It's not brave to think tricky, well-hidden bad guys are the whole truth of what's out there. It might even be bravery's opposite. Or maybe it should go under the name religion. — Jonathan Lethem

My dream is to do something like the female Bourne, and do something in that world. To mix that high level of drama with the covert operation, conspiracy theory spy world fascinates me and it's so interesting. It's fun to do it. — Ali Larter

We've seen it over and over throughout history, it isn't a conspiracy theory anymore that the truly great ones get taken out. That's a trend, but when will people realize that after new world order, worldwide communism will take place. — Auliq Ice

If something comes along that you don't like, there are a few sort of four-letter words that you can use to push it out of the sphere of discussion. If you were in a bar downtown, they might have different words, but if you're an educated person what you use are complicated words like "conspiracy theory" or "Marxist." It's a way of pushing unpleasant questions off the agenda so that we can continue in our own happy ideology. — Noam Chomsky

In a world of full of manipulation, half-truths and lies, the conspiracy theory is often a safer bet than the official story. — Gary Hopkins

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

Conspiracy theories are the refuge of the disempowered. — Roger Cohen

Maybe the most dangerous thing about the "Illuminati" isn't that such a master cabal has ever existed, but that some people believe it should and wreak havoc under the delusion they run the world. — Richard B. Spence

People who mock incidents in history such as 9/11 or the Holocaust, referring to it all as a hoax or stirring up crazy conspiracy theories about it, should really stop and think about their words first, both because it shows flaws in logic and rationality to deny the obvious, and because to play pretend with incidents which killed innocent people, well, that's just like laughing in the face of tragedy. It's as if to say, "no, it's not horrible enough that these people were killed, oh no, we have to drag on these incidents by indulging in melodramatic fantasies!" In essence this means that those who lost loved ones not only have to live with these losses forever, they also have to live with the people who deny that any of it ever happened. It does no good to forget history or to deny it. All it does is desensitize people; it tells them that it's all just a game, which then risks the possibility of nobody taking it seriously enough to prevent something similar from happening again. — Rebecca McNutt

For reporting a scientific finding, I was called a 'conspiracy theorist.' Only in America is scientific analysis seen as conspiracy theory and government lies as truth. — Paul Craig Roberts

As a face and a heel, Savage saw wrestling the way so many of us viewers did. He saw that every wrestler had an ulterior motive, that everyone was out for himself - that conspiracy theory was the only reasonable lens through which to perceive WWF reality. — David Shoemaker

I've only read a few chapters of this book, Trumpet Blast Warning but it's amazing. All of his statements are backed up by original quotes & references from top politicians, the media, etc, so you can check for yourselves & discover this is not a conspiracy theory about world government, it's all backed by facts! All Christians, especially pastors & prayer groups really should read this book. Many thanks to Jason Carter for sending me a copy! — Jason Carter

Conspiracy theory's got to be simple. Sense doesn't come into it. People are more scared of how complicated shit actually is than they ever are about whatever's supposed to be behind the conspiracy. — William Gibson

I believe that the Big-Bang Theory and the Evolution Theory, as well as Einstein's Special Relativity Theory which does not allow for the existence of faster-than-light (superluminal) phenomena, all have flaws in them and must be replaced by new theories that can give Mankind a more concise view of our Universe. But the fact is exceptional discoveries and theories that challenge official science have been ignored by the Establishment for decades. — Takaaki Musha

Despite its veneer of impartial scholarship, Butz's book is replete with the same expressions of traditional anti-Semitism, philo-Germanism and conspiracy theory as the Holocaust denial pamphlets printed by the most scurrilous neo-Nazi groups.

-- Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, page 126 — Deborah E. Lipstadt

I feel like I'm twenty again. — Elizabeth Horton-Newton

I don't believe in the moon landing conspiracy theory. I don't believe in Big Foot. — Jerome Corsi

A "conspiracy theory" no longer means an event explained by a conspiracy. Instead it now means any explanation or even a fact that is out of step with the government's explanation and that of its media pimps. — Paul Craig Roberts

As we know, Clay Shaw was acquitted, and the establishment celebrated
another victory over the truth. In my view, Ferrie, Banister, Shaw, and Jack
Ruby would have been the conspirators Oswald worked with personally, on
the ground level, while far more powerful forces manipulated everything
behind the scenes. I share Jim Garrison's theory that Oswald was some kind
of intelligence operative who was assigned to infiltrate what he was told was
a plot to kill the president, shortly before the actual assassination. At least
that's where I think the evidence logically leads. — Donald Jeffries

At this time on a weekday morning, the library was refuge to the retired, the unemployed, and the unemployable ... 'I'm not always this gabby,' the librarian said. 'It's just so nice to talk to someone who isn't constructing a conspiracy theory or watching videos of home accidents on YouTube. — Myla Goldberg

Conspiracy theory, like causality, works fantastically well as an explanatory model but only if you use it backwards. The fact that we cannot predict much about tomorrow strongly indicates that most of the explanations we develop about how something happened yesterday have (like history in general) a high bullshit content. — Peter J. Carroll

As the saying goes not every conspiracy is a theory. — Joseph Finder

The only other scenario that could explain everything, up to and including your own bizarre apperance, is a convoluted conspiracy theory involving the Russian Mafia and a crack team of plastic surgeons. — Eoin Colfer

You simply cannot invent any conspiracy theory so ridiculous and obviously satirical that some people somewhere don't already believe it. — Robert Anton Wilson

I'm not the religious-conspiracy-theorist go-to guy, particularly. But I think it's really kind of silly to try to equate birds falling out of the sky with some kind of an end-times theory. — Kirk Cameron

And to answer the question that people have about this conspiracy theory that he has a pack in his back, my answer is, if someone was feeding him answers, couldn't they be able to feed him better ones than he came up with? — Bill Maher

Political systems must love poverty-they produce so much of it. Poor people make easier targets for a demagogue. No Mao or even Jiang Zemin is likely to arise on the New York Stock Exchange floor. And politicians in democracies benefit from destitution, too. The US has had a broad range of poverty programs for 30 years. Those programs have failed. Millions of people are still poor. And those people vote for politicians who favor keeping the poverty programs in place. There's a conspiracy theory in there somewhere. — P. J. O'Rourke

The shelves of many evangelicals are full of books that point out the flaws in evolution, discuss it only as a theory, and almost imply that there's a conspiracy here to avoid the fact that evolution is actually flawed. All of those books, unfortunately, are based upon conclusions that no reasonable biologist would now accept. — Francis Collins

I really wish there was some big brother conspiracy theory. I just think it's the ignorance of trying to make a dollar. That's what the networks have done and will continue to do. If anyone doesn't think that this is about making money, then they're crazy. — Montel Williams

Following Korzybski , I put things in probabilities, not absolutes ... My only originality lies in applying this zetetic attitude outside the hardest of the hard sciences, physics , to softer sciences and then to non-sciences like politics , ideology , jury verdicts and, of course, conspiracy theory . — Robert Anton Wilson

If history is written by the victors, conspiracy theory is typically written by the losers, and there were few greater losers in the revolution than the French church and especially the Jesuits. — Mike Jay

Conspiracy theory is the ultimate refuge of the powerless. If you cannot change your own life, it must be that some greater force controls the world. — Roger Cohen

Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment ... The gene has its cultural analog, too: the meme. In cultural evolution, a meme is a replicator and propagator - an idea, a fashion, a chain letter, or a conspiracy theory. On a bad day, a meme is a virus. — James Gleick

Culture, religion, and education, are conspiracies to standardize worldviews. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana