We are Penn & Teller and conspiracy theories are bullshit. Penn & Teller, Bullshit! s3e3: Conspiracy Theories, Showtime 2005
A law made before the Middle Ages and never sanctioned by parliament has been dug up quite recently to be used virtually unchanged as a tool of suppression. Let’s be quite clear. This law can affect us all ... At your trial you can be convicted on rumours, on who you are, on how you live, on what your friends are. Conspiracy, an English judge said recently, can amount to a nod and a wink. John Pilger, A Nod and a Wink, ITV 1975
In 1973 Shrewsbury building workers campaigned against the notorious Lump – the use of non-union labour and its acceptance of dangerous work conditions. At the trial of the Shrewsbury pickets, who are charged with conspiracy to intimidate, the judge said, You know very well it can be a conspiracy when they never met and they never knew each other. ibid.
At dawn one morning last October the Special Branch raided the London offices of Peace News: they found a pile of leaflets and a member of the staff John Hyatt asleep. The leaflets belonged to the British Withdrawal From Northern Island Campaign. And Hyatt was arrested and eventually charged along with thirteen others of Conspiracy to Incite Disaffection Against Soldiers. ibid.
These laws are a dragnet, a perfect weapon to use against critics of the prevailing order and political opposition ... A great many lawyers are appalled by the use of the conspiracy laws ... Used to intimidate and silence all kinds of dissent ... The conspiracy laws can in effect by used to invent new crimes. Indeed the application of these laws is unlimited, and they are in my view bad laws. ibid.
It seemed to me that all over the world intelligent people were waking up to the indignity and absurdity of being endangered, restrained, and impoverished, by a mere uncritical adhesion to traditional governments, traditional ideas of economic life, and traditional forms of behaviour, and that these awaking intelligent people must constitute first a protest and then a creative resistance to the inertia that was stifling and threatening us. These people I imagined would say first, ‘We are drifting; we are doing nothing worthwhile with our lives. Our lives are dull and stupid and not good enough.’
Then they would say, ‘What are we to do with our lives?’
And then, ‘Let us get together with other people of our sort and make over the world into a great world-civilization that will enable us to realize the promises and avoid the dangers of this new time.’ H G Wells, What Are We to Do With Our Lives
However the overriding issue in the administration of the law of conspiracy is whether the purpose of a particular getting together is socially harmful. Lord Hailsham, former Lord Chancellor
If it’s not an act of God, it’s a conspiracy. Jim Marrs
The more you start investigating conspiracy theories the more you realise that there is a conspiracy. And the conspiracy is they are out to kill you. Clyde Lewis, DJ and presenter of Ground Zero
Now if that story had been disclosed as it should, then much of the general perception as to what happened in 1989 in the Hillsborough Stadium would have been changed ... lending support to the families and supporters who remain dissatisfied with the South Yorkshire police and the disclosure issues. Tony Farrell, former South Yorkshire police principal intelligence analyst, sacked for 9/11 views
Conspiracy theories? No, it’s about weighing up the evidence and deciding your own mind. Tony Farrell
We’ve chosen the top five favourite science conspiracies, theories and hoaxes that might be news to you: up first, the lost cosmonauts ... Number two, the growing earth theory ... Number three, the Cardiff Giant ... Number four, the phantom time hypothesis ... Number five, the Roswell Incident case closed. James Williams, Discovery News
You can’t know how much of a conspiracy there is in the US these days. Maybe it’s economics. Who knows what it is? I’m not able to say. But I do know it’s real. Reverend Jim Jones, The People’s Temple, cited Stanley Nelson, Jim Jones: The Life and Death of the People’s Temple
The top ten mysteries and conspiracies – we examine the top most elusive and tantalising secrets of our times ...
10) Has Anyone Seen Bigfoot?
9) Is There a Loch Ness Monster?
8) Who Made the Nazca Lines?
7) Do Vampires Exist?
6) Where is the Ark of the Covenant?
5) The Bermuda Triangle
4) Who Killed Tutankhamun?
3) Jack the Ripper: The World’s First Serial Killer?
2) Nazi UFOs
1) Did the Mob Kill JFK? Top 10 Mysteries and Conspiracies
In 1969 four of us ran on to the Davis Cup tennis court and sat down on the field. We were cleared off by police. It was fairly friendly. And certainly peaceful. The police never charged us. Yet three years later I was found guilty of conspiring to trespass upon that tennis court and was given a £200 fine and found guilty ... I could have been given life imprisonment for conspiring to shout an insulting slogan. Because there’s no limit on the sentence that a conspiracy charge can result in. Peter Hain, protesting against Apartheid in South African sport, later Labour MP
Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators but names and customs. Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am as innocent regarding any conspiracy as any of you gentlemen in the room. Jack Ruby
Young people have no conception of the Conspiracy’s strategy of ‘pressure from above and pressure from below’ ... They have no idea that they are playing into the hands of the Establishment they claim to hate ... The radicals think they are fighting the forces of the super-rich like Rockefeller and Ford, and don’t realise that it is precisely such forces which are behind their own revolution, financing it, and using it for their own purposes. Jerry Kirk, Black Panthers & US Communist Party, 1970 evidence before House Internal Security Committee
The conspiratorial view of history, particularly of recent history, is the correct view. That there is a secret and powerful combination at work today, that it constitutes the unseen government of the United States, and it properly can be identified as the Capitalist Conspiracy. G Edward Griffin, The Capitalist Conspiracy
No conspiracy can stand the light of exposure; no conspiracy can rule the masses without the tool of an extensive government bureaucracy; and certainly no capitalist conspiracy can long survive without control over the nation’s money. ibid.
There is and has been for some time a conspiracy among some of the richest people in the world. A conspiracy that virtually owns the money systems ... In the United States this monetary fraud is perpetuated through the Federal Reserve system ... The capitalist conspiracy in this country surfaces to public view in the form of the semi-secret Council on Foreign Relations ... On the surface the capitalist conspiracy appears to oppose communism ... There is much evidence indicating that the capitalist and communist conspiracies both are directed by a single master conspiracy which may have continuity with the Order of the Illuminati ... As for our response, we must begin to dismantle the conspiracy’s machine of big government ... We must reduce the Federal Reserve system to a service function of clearing cheques between banks only ... We must expose the conspiracy to public view. ibid.
It is not shameful to ask questions. Mary Starrett, Constitution Party
At Number Ten [Anthony] Eden had secretly conspired with the French and the Israelis to invade Egypt. Michael Cockerell, The Secret World of Whitehall 1/3: The Real Sir Humphrey, BBC 2011
Anthony Eden asked Norman Brook to destroy the Cabinet papers relating to the conspiracy over Suez, which Norman Brook did. ibid.
If I had my way about it they’d all be sent back to Russia or some other unpleasant place. Robert Taylor, McCarthy hearings
Since the middle of the twentieth century there have been movies and television productions as well as books and magazines and newspaper articles with a conspiracy theory theme. And they’ve been aggressively marketed to the public. Q) What is the real purpose of those who fund and produce conspiracy theories films and programmes for public consumption? Alan Hart, Media Morphs: Conspiracy I, producer Hossein Setareh, Edge Media 2012
Arguably, the most powerful force is the military-industrial complex. It not only needs conflict to create wealth and jobs, it needs citizens to believe there is always an enemy out there. ibid.
The new reality was the Cold War and that was the beginning of the modern age of the conspiracy theory. ibid.
Joe McCarthy – a Republican senator from Wisconsin. He had been developing his anti-communist public stance for several years. ibid.
Among the earliest of such films were The Red Menace and The Conspirator. Both released in 1949. ibid.
In 1953 the movie Big Jim McLean was a combination of conspiracy theme and detective story. ibid.