Conspiracies Quotes

“He wanted a stiff drink to get through the evening, for he knew they’d be wailing, and her family coming unglued.”
― Carolyn M. Bowen, Legacy of Shadows: An International Crime Thriller

“It was strange how he’d made a 180-degree change. Not sure what to make of that curly, bigheaded, bozo yet, she thought, other than fruitcake nuts!
“Blah, I’m not sure about your other big brother,” Savanna said, wiggling her nose upward. “I’d rather not chat about him. Do you come to the museum often?” she asked, quickly changing the topic. “I love unusual old history,” she divulged.”
― Sharon Carter, Love Auction II: Love Designs

“Telling Sam and Daneca feels like peeling off my own skin to expose everything underneath. It hurts.”
― Holly Black, White Cat

“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

“Sounds to me you just haven’t found the right man, is all,” Sage proposed. “When the time comes, it will be when you least expect it. My late husband died three years ago, and Nick and Niki came into my life unexpectedly. My husband ran a background check on me before we met, which was understandable. He had been through a messy divorce. He tried to stay away from me but couldn’t. I’m blessed to have them, including this bundle of joy,” she shone with pleasure.”
― Sharon Carter, Love Auction II: Love Designs

“Nall, there’s nothing but friendship between Jase and me,” Savanna explained. “He’s been such a huge help to me. When I first arrived in your big, beautiful city, it was his darling, handsome face I saw first, waiting for me. He’s such a good friend and co-worker,” she complimented.”
― Sharon Carter, Love Auction II: Love Designs

“You know something is wrong when the government declares opening someone else’s mail is a felony but your internet activity is fair game for data collecting.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri

“On the other side of the room, Bast cursed her luck. Damn. She couldn’t wait now. It took time to set up a switch like this. She would have to take the second option. A pity, the Rowanberg woman was the right size physically, and the facial adjustment would not be difficult, nor the hair, and she was one of the targets on her list. Option Two was slightly taller, but she would have to do.”
― Patrick G Cox, First into the Fray

“Don't be quick to believe the bad things you hear about good people. Everyone has a story left untold.”
― Majid Kazmi, The First Dancer: How to be the first among equals and attract unlimited opportunities

“One reason she had been as successful an assassin had always been her attention to detail, but the weeks of using the cream to maintain her disguise as the hapless dock technician, were taking their toll. Details slipped her mind occasionally, and concentrating was sometimes hard. She’d used the time she had available to study her target, learn his mannerisms and speech pattern, food and clothing preferences. Most of this possible with the right programs and access to the dock AI system. Those hours ‘at work’ in the Fabrication Unit had been well spent, and supplemented by frequenting places where she could observe him. The lack of her usual team of ‘daemons’ had created a number of difficulties, and though she wondered how Security had managed to take them down so quickly, she didn’t waste time worrying over it. Now she knew who he associated with, and his sexuality—all of it vital if she was to escape detection in such a high profile role.”
― Patrick G Cox, First into the Fray

“James climbed into the transport vehicle, and the moment Felicity’s eyes met his was practically charged with electricity, the attraction was so strong. Her smile was just the balm he needed.
“Here I am, Captain, alive and well, never better. I think I even lost a few pounds in my enforced confinement!”
“Felicity, good to see you. You look great as always. But I have to ask, do you usually resort to such extreme measures when you want to stand up a partner for a dinner date?”
He saw the tease in her eyes as she smiled at him. “Only in exceptional circumstances—or when someone leaves me no option.”
― Patrick G Cox, First into the Fray

“There followed a three-year spectacle during which [Senator Joseph] McCarthy captured enormous media attention by prophesying the imminent ruin of America and by making false charges that he then denied raising—only to invent new ones. He claimed to have identified subversives in the State Department, the army, think tanks, universities, labor unions, the press, and Hollywood. He cast doubt on the patriotism of all who criticized him, including fellow senators. McCarthy was profoundly careless about his sources of information and far too glib when connecting dots that had no logical link. In his view, you were guilty if you were or ever had been a Communist, had attended a gathering where a supposed Communist sympathizer was present, had read a book authored by someone soft on Communism, or subscribed to a magazine with liberal ideas. McCarthy, who was nicknamed Tailgunner Joe, though he had never been a tail gunner, was also fond of superlatives. By the middle of 1951, he was warning the Senate of “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.”

McCarthy would neither have become a sensation, nor ruined the careers of so many innocent people, had he not received support from some of the nation’s leading newspapers and financing from right-wingers with deep pockets. He would have been exposed much sooner had his wild accusations not been met with silence by many mainstream political leaders from both parties who were uncomfortable with his bullying tactics but lacked the courage to call his bluff. By the time he self-destructed, a small number of people working in government had indeed been identified as security risks, but none because of the Wisconsin senator’s scattershot investigations.

McCarthy fooled as many as he did because a lot of people shared his anxieties, liked his vituperative style, and enjoyed watching the powerful squirm. Whether his allegations were greeted with resignation or indignation didn’t matter so much as the fact that they were reported on and repeated. The more inflammatory the charge, the more coverage it received. Even skeptics subscribed to the idea that, though McCarthy might be exaggerating, there had to be some fire beneath the smoke he was spreading. This is the demagogue’s trick, the Fascist’s ploy, exemplified most outrageously by the spurious and anti-Jewish Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Repeat a lie often enough and it begins to sound as if it must—or at least might—be so. “Falsehood flies,” observed Jonathan Swift, “and the truth comes limping after it.” McCarthy’s career shows how much hysteria a skilled and shameless prevaricator can stir up, especially when he claims to be fighting in a just cause. After all, if Communism was the ultimate evil, a lot could be hazarded—including objectivity and conventional morality—in opposing it.”
― Madeleine K. Albright, Fascism: A Warning

“By now, certain alternate theories are beginning to circulate online. It's the government, they say. Or it's Big Pharma. Some kind of germ must have gotten loose from a lab at the college.

Think about it, they say: Do you really believe that a completely new virus could show up in the most powerful country on earth without scientists knowing exactly what it is? They probably engineered it themselves. They might be spreading this thing on purpose, testing out a biological weapon. They might be withholding the cure.

Or maybe there's no sickness at all—that's what some have begun posting online. Isn't Santa Lora the perfect location for a hoax? An isolated town, surrounded by forest, only one road in and one road out. And those people you see on TV? Those could be hired victims. Those could be crisis actors paid to play their parts. And the supposedly sick? Come on, how hard is it to pretend you're asleep?

Maybe, a few begin to say, Santa Lora is not even a real town. Has anyone ever heard of this place? And look it up: there's no such saint as Santa Lora. It's made-up. The whole damn place is probably just a set on some back lot in Culver City. Don't those houses look a little too quaint?

Don't be naïve, say others—they don't need a set. All that footage is probably just streaming out of some editing room in the valley. If you look closely, you can tell that some of those houses repeat.

Now just ask yourself, they say, who stands to benefit from all this. It always comes back to money, right? The medical-industrial complex. And who do you think pays the salaries of these so-called journalists reporting all this fake news? Just watch: in a few months, Big Pharma will be selling the vaccine.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“While conspiracies have been well-documented as taking place throughout history, in every epoch and location, immediately when you begin to speak about the conspiracies that are happening now, you are labelled a 'lunatic.' This is because there exist very powerful, super-wealthy families with strong connections to the Demiurge who want to hide the fact that he is covertly taking control of Planet Earth.”
― Laurence Galian, Alien Parasites: 40 Gnostic Truths to Defeat the Archon Invasion!

“Conspiracy theory is bloomed at the rate of one hundred and forty characters a second.”
― Mick Herron, London Rules

“Reflective nostalgics miss the past and dream about the past. Some of them study the past and even mourn the past, especially their own personal past. But they do not really want the past back. Perhaps this is because, deep down, they know that the old homestead is in ruins, or because it has been gentrified beyond recognition--or because they quietly recognize that they wouldn't much like it now anyway. Once upon a time life might have been sweeter or simpler, but it was also more dangerous, or more boring, or perhaps more unjust.

Radically different from the reflective nostalgics are what Boym calls the restorative nostalgics, not all of whom recognize themselves as nostalgics at all. Restorative nostalgics don't just look at old photographs and piece together family stories. They are mythmakers and architects, builders of monuments and founders of nationalist political projects. They do not merely want to contemplate or learn from the past. They want, as Boym puts it, to "rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps." Many of them don't recognize their own fictions about the past for what they are: "They believe their project is about truth." They are not interested in a nuanced past, in a world in which great leaders were flawed men, in which famous military victories had lethal side effects. They don't acknowledge that the past might have had its drawbacks. They want the cartoon version of history, and more importantly, they want to live in it, right now. They don't want to act out roles from the past because it amuses them: they want to behave as think their ancestors did, without irony.

It is not by accident that restorative nostalgia often goes hand in hand with conspiracy theories and the medium-sized lies. These needn't be as harsh or crazy as the Smolensk conspiracy theory or the Soros conspiracy theory; they can gently invoke scapegoats rather than a full-fledged alternative reality. At a minimum, they can offer an explanation: The nation is no longer great because someone has attacked us, undermined us, sapped our strength. Someone—the immigrants, the foreigners, the elites, or indeed the EU—has perverted the course of history and reduced the nation to a shadow of its former self. The essential identity that we once had has been taken away and replaced with something cheap and artificial. Eventually, those who seek power on the back of restorative nostalgia will begin to cultivate these conspiracy theories, or alternative histories, or alternative fibs, whether or not they have any basis in fact.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“Oona's mother was active online, and listened to the radio, and watched the news, and she had come to believe she was on the inside, among the elect, those who understood the plot, the plot her daughter said was ridiculous, a plot that had been building for years, for decades, maybe for centuries, the plot against their kind, yes their kind, no matter what her daughter said, for they had a kind, the only people who could not call themselves a people in this country, and there were not so many of them left, and now it had arrived, and was upon them, and she was afraid, for what could she do, but there were those among them who would stand up, stand up and protect her, and she had to believe in them, and be ready, be ready as best she could, to preserve herself, and especially her daughter, her daughter who was the future....”
― Mohsin Hamid, The Last White Man

“As the machinations of the end-time conspiracy seemed to become more involved, some fundamentalists felt a need to monitor the enemy. Conspiracy theorists share a passion for gathering and collating data matched only by professional intelligence agencies. In 1937, the fundamentalist Church League of America, in Wheaton, Illinois, began to compile dossiers on the enemies of Christ. By the late 1960s, the group claimed to have seven million index cards on subversives, a collection they said was second only to that of the FBI. An associate of Mclntire, Major Edgar C. Bundy, assumed control of the Church League of America in 1956. Using his experience as a former Air Force intelligence officer, Bundy built up a data bank the organization had inherited from J. B. Matthews, a former investigator for Senator McCarthy.”
― George Johnson, Architects Of Fear

“Florida was the experiment," Santa told me. "Florida was stop number one on the Agenda.”
― Chase Griffin, What's On the Menu?

“People seemed uniquely printed to believe in plots and conspiracies, miracles and demons.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“I once read an analysis on conspiracy theorists, which posited that they, more than most, crave security and order. So it's easier to believe that big bad shadowy forces are in control, because that way, someone is still in control. But f**k you if you're spreading bulls**t.”
― Amy Remeikis

“The popular Revolution was the surface of a volcano of foreign conspiracies. The Constituent Assembly, a senate by day, was by night a collection of factions which prepared the policy and artifices of the morrow. Affairs had a double intention; one ostensibly and gracefully coloured, the other secret, leading to hidden results contrary to the interests of the people. They made war on the nobility, the guilty friend of the Bourbons, in order to pave the way to the throne for Orleans. One sees at each step the efforts of this party to ruin the Court, its enemy, and to preserve royalty, but the loss of one entailed the other; no royalty can exist without a patriciate.”
― Saint Just

“The popular Revolution was the surface of a volcano of foreign conspiracies. The Constituent Assembly, a senate by day, was by night a collection of factions which prepared the policy and artifices of the morrow. Affairs had a double intention; one ostensibly and gracefully coloured, the other secret, leading to hidden results contrary to the interests of the people. They made war on the nobility, the guilty friend of the Bourbons, in order to pave the way to the throne for Orleans. One sees at each step the efforts of this party to ruin the Court, its enemy, and to preserve royalty, but the loss of one entailed the other; no royalty can exist without a patriciate.”
― Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, Œuvres complètes

“Everywhere liberty is surrounded by secret or open enemies”
― George Sanders

“Don't create and support internal conspiracies; be aware of such external schemes and eliminate them. Such a spirit will secure you and your state in all dimensions.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“It is Inconceivable that those with power and wealth would not band together with a common bond, a common interest, and a long-range plan to decide and direct the future of the world.”
― Milton William Cooper, Behold a Pale Horse

“Your life is an open book, or at least a file on a hard drive in someone's office.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Whoever remains involved in conspiracies should be brought to justice instead of allegations, demeaning, blaming, humiliating, and even blackmailing without evidence is in itself a grave crime; it should be dealt with at a high level.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“Conspiracies never bring good results or profitability.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“How had so many men conspired against him for so long?”
― Alexander Freed, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story