Source: The City & the City (2009), Chapter 13 (p. 141)
via Twitter https://twitter.com/johannes_mono/status/1250039288517050369
"The Mindscape of Alan Moore" (2003)
Context: The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theorists actually believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy or the grey aliens or the 12 foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control. The truth is more frightening, nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.
“History is much more the product of chaos than of conspiracy.”
The New York Times, January 18, 1981 Quotation of the Day http://www.nytimes.com/1981/01/18/nyregion/quotation-of-the-day-227621.html?scp=28&sq=Brzezinski&st=nyt.
Variant: History is much more the product of chaos than of conspiracy.
Reading Like a Writer, ch. 2, p. 15 (2006)
“I'm not a conspiracy theorist - I'm a conspiracy analyst.”
Quoted in The Guardian, by Ryszard Kapuściński, in "Vidal salon" https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/may/05/featuresreviews.guardianreview14 (5 May 2007)
2000s
Nobel lecture (8 December 1980)
Context: Only if we assume that a poet constantly strives to liberate himself from borrowed styles in search for reality, is he dangerous. In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot. And, alas, a temptation to pronounce it, similar to an acute itching, becomes an obsession which doesn't allow one to think of anything else. That is why a poet chooses internal or external exile. It is not certain, however, that he is motivated exclusively by his concern with actuality. He may also desire to free himself from it and elsewhere, in other countries, on other shores, to recover, at least for short moments, his true vocation — which is to contemplate Being.
"The Mindscape of Alan Moore" (2003) http://themindscapeofalanmoore.com/index.html
Context: Yes, there is a conspiracy, in fact there are a great number of conspiracies that are all tripping each other up. And all of those conspiracies are run by paranoid fantasists and ham-fisted clowns. If you are on a list targeted by the CIA, you really have nothing to worry about. If however, you have a name similar to somebody on a list targeted by the CIA, then you are dead.
Source: Green Mars (1993), Chapter 9, “The Spur of the Moment” (p. 450)
