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Life & Wisdom Quote by Ken MacLeod

"The world has become one big grassy knoll, crawling with lone gunmen who think they're the Warren Commission"

About this Quote

MacLeod turns paranoia into landscape: not a shadowy backroom, but "one big grassy knoll", the most over-interpreted patch of turf in modern American myth. The joke lands because it treats conspiracy not as a fringe hobby but as a dominant ecology. The world is a crime scene now, and everyone is hunched over it, squinting for the angle that proves they were right all along.

The phrase "crawling with lone gunmen" flips the JFK-era contradiction on its head. "Lone gunman" was the official story meant to close the case; MacLeod uses it as a multiplying species. It's a neat, bleak gag: if everyone is a lone actor, the loneliness becomes collective, a crowd unified by suspicion. Then comes the sharper barb: they "think they're the Warren Commission". Not "the CIA", not "the puppet masters", but the investigators - the people who get to launder chaos into an authoritative narrative. The subtext is about power disguised as explanation. Conspiracy culture isn't only about distrusting institutions; it's about wanting to become one, to claim the prestige of final judgment.

As a science fiction writer shaped by late-Cold War politics and the internet age, MacLeod is writing into a world where information is abundant and trust is scarce. His line captures the era's signature move: replacing shared reality with competing dossiers, each one performed with the confidence of a government report. The cynicism isn't that truth is impossible; it's that everyone wants to be the one who declares it closed.

Quote Details

TopicWitty One-Liners
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APA Style (7th ed.)
MacLeod, Ken. (2026, January 15). The world has become one big grassy knoll, crawling with lone gunmen who think they're the Warren Commission. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-world-has-become-one-big-grassy-knoll-162690/

Chicago Style
MacLeod, Ken. "The world has become one big grassy knoll, crawling with lone gunmen who think they're the Warren Commission." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-world-has-become-one-big-grassy-knoll-162690/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The world has become one big grassy knoll, crawling with lone gunmen who think they're the Warren Commission." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-world-has-become-one-big-grassy-knoll-162690/. Accessed 7 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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Ken MacLeod (born August 2, 1954) is a Writer from Scotland.

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