Conspiracy theories Quote by Thomas M. Nichols

“Conspiracy theories are also a way for people to give context and meaning to events that frighten them. Without a coherent explanation for why terrible things happen to innocent people, they would have to accept such occurrences as nothing more than the random cruelty either of an uncaring…” quote by Thomas M. Nichols — Download Open image

““Conspiracy theories are also a way for people to give context and meaning to events that frighten them. Without a coherent explanation for why terrible things happen to innocent people, they would have to accept such occurrences as nothing more than the random cruelty either of an uncaring universe or an incomprehensible deity.””

Thomas M. Nichols

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“Conspiracy theorists manipulate all tangible evidence to fit their explanation, but worse, they will also point to the absence of evidence as even stronger confirmation. After all, what better sign of a really effective conspiracy is there than a complete lack of any trace that the conspiracy exists? Facts, the absence of facts, contradictory facts: everything is proof. Nothing can…

Thomas M. Nichols

“Today, by contrast, students explode over imagined slights that are not even remotely in the same category as fighting for civil rights or being sent to war. Students now build majestic Everests from the smallest molehills, and they descend into hysteria over pranks and hoaxes. In the midst of it all, the students are learning that emotion and volume can…

Thomas M. Nichols

“And when voters lose control of these important decisions, they risk the hijacking of their democracy by ignorant demagogues, or the more quiet and…

Thomas M. Nichols

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“As the economic writer Ben Casselman pointed out in 2016, most college applicants “never have to write a college entrance essay, pad a résumé or sweet-talk a potential letter-writer,” because more than three-quarters of American undergraduates attend colleges that accept at least half their applicants. Only 4 percent attend schools that accept 25 percent or less, and fewer than 1…

Thomas M. Nichols

“People do not come to the Internet so that their bad information can be corrected or their cherished theories disproven. Rather, they ask the electronic oracle to confirm them in their ignorance. In 2015 a Washington Post writer, Caitlin Dewey, worried that fact-checking could never defeat myths and hoaxes because “no one has the time or cognitive capacity to reason…

Thomas M. Nichols

“If the public has no idea about the substance of an issue, and will vote based on who they like rather than what they want, it is difficult to put too much blame on policymakers and their expert advisers for being confused themselves. How can a republic function if the people who have sent their representatives to decide questions of…

Thomas M. Nichols

“The issue is not indifference to established knowledge; it’s the emergence of a positive hostility to such knowledge. This is new in American culture,…

Thomas M. Nichols

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“At the root of all this is an inability among laypeople to understand that experts being wrong on occasion about certain issues is not the same thing as experts being wrong consistently on everything. The fact of the matter is that experts are more often right than wrong, especially on essential matters of fact. And yet the public constantly searches…

Thomas M. Nichols

“The requirements of a degree in a STEM field (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), a demanding foreign language, or a rigorous degree in the humanities can be a different matter than a major in communications or visual arts or—as much as it pains me to say it—political science. Every campus has “default majors,” chosen when a student has no real idea…

Thomas M. Nichols

“In 2015, a Massachusetts accountant named Stephen Pasceri lost his seventy-eight-year-old mother to cardiovascular disease. Mrs. Pasceri had a long history of health trouble, including emphysema, and died after an operation to repair a heart valve. Pasceri, however, was convinced that one of his mother’s doctors, Michael Davidson—the director of endovascular cardiac surgery at a top Boston hospital and a…

Thomas M. Nichols

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread…

Thomas M. Nichols

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“The modern media, with so many options tailored to particular views, is a huge exercise in confirmation bias. This means that Americans are not…

Thomas M. Nichols

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More Conspiracy theories quotes

We have Internet now and people are not stupid. But it seems that some people are trying to push the same agenda of the…

Bassem Youssef

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So Pakistan is a country that I'm very fond of and have spent a lot of time, but it is a country where conspiracy…

Peter Bergen

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“Conspiracy theories explaining the Bolshevik victory gained widespread credence: the most popular of these was that of international Jewish conspiracy, since Trotsky, Zinoviev, and a number of other Bolshevik leaders were Jewish; but another theory, revived in Solzhenitsyn's Lenin in Zurich, pictured the Bolsheviks as pawns of the Germans in a successful plot to take Russia out of the war.…

Sheila Fitzpatrick

“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"…

Martinus Hendrikus Benders

“Once in power, Stalin’s campaign to succeed Lenin required a legitimate heroic career which he did not possess because of his experience in what he called 'the dirty business' of politics: this could not be told, either because it was too gangsterish for a great, paternalistic statesman or because it was too Georgian for a Russian leader. His solution was…

Simon Sebag Montefiore

“Believing in a conspiracy theory is one strategy people use to regain a sense of control, even if the conspiracy theory is unrelated to…

Oscar Auliq-Ice Junior

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That is what I want to make clear today. A man with a long history of racial discrimination, who traffics in dark conspiracy theories…

Hillary Clinton

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I always say Manny [Ramirez] is a strange guy. Outwardly, he's happy-go-lucky. On the inside, he's got a lot of conspiracy theories going on. I would say Manny might be one of these guys when he's 50 years old, he might be in his house with all the blinds shut kind of looking out like the CIA's out there. You…

Bronson Arroyo

The [Donald's] Trump war on the press continues. Tonight, the national cost of a conservative media bubble, now featuring alien conspiracy theories. And about…

Chris Hayes

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The only time I commit to conspiracy theories is when something way retarded happens. Like Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone.

Joe Rogan

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Conspiracy theories themselves are big business, of course, selling books, videos, conferences, and all kinds of merch. Then there is the economy that promotes…

Annie Lowrey

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“New Rule: Conspiracy theorists who are claiming that we didn't really kill Bin Laden must be reminded that they didn't think he did the crime in the first place. Come on, nutjobs, keep your bullshit straight: The towers were brought down in a controlled demolition by George W. Bush to distract attention from Hawaii, where CIA operatives were planting phony…

Bill Maher

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Conspiracy theories Quote by Thomas M. Nichols

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