Top 500 Philip K. Dick Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “Look, Haley’s comet!”

— Philip K. Dick

452. “A man is an angel that has become deranged, Joe Fernwright thought. Once they – all of them – had been genuine angels, and at that time they had had a choice between good and evil, so it was easy, easy being an angel. And then something happened. Something went wrong or broke down or failed. And they had become faced with the necessity of choosing not good or evil but the lesser of two evils, and so that had unhinged them and now each was a man.”

— Philip K. Dick

453. “But she looked – smaller. As if something in her had dwindled away, as if she had dried up. It was almost – age. Yet not quite. Could their separation have done this much damage? He doubted it. His wife, since he had seen her last, had become frail, and he did not like this; despite his animosity he felt concern.”

— Philip K. Dick

454. “The guilty, he reflected as he drove amid the heavy late-afternoon traffic as carefully as possible, may flee when no one pursues – he.”

— Philip K. Dick

455. “We cannot enter the monstrous schizophrenic morass of Nazi internecine intrigue; our minds cannot adapt.”

— Philip K. Dick

456. “God, what a dreadful thing – the truth.”

— Philip K. Dick

457. “Simple Shepherd Mortuary.”

— Philip K. Dick

458. “Going to the closet – it was the ancient-style manual variety – he hung up his coat.”

— Philip K. Dick

459. “God, they read a book, he thought, and they spout on forever.”

— Philip K. Dick

460. “A dream woke me,” Arctor said. “A religious dream. In it there was this huge clap of thunder, and all of a sudden the heavens rolled aside and God appeared and His voice rumbled at me-what the hell did He say?-oh yeah. ‘I am vexed with you, my son’ He said. He was scowling. I was shaking, in the dream, and looking up, and I said, ‘What’d I do now, Lord?’ And He said, ‘You left the cap off the toothpaste tube again.’ And then I realized it was my ex-wife.”

— Philip K. Dick

461. “Nothing is true.”

— Philip K. Dick

462. “Basically, Sherri’s idea had to do with bringing Fat’s mind down from the cosmic and the abstract to the particular. She had hatched out the practical notion that nothing is more real than a large World War Two Soviet tank.”

— Philip K. Dick

463. “A man driven by rage may stumble, in his passion, onto truth.”

— Philip K. Dick

464. “We trust – I’ll tell you what we trust that fouls us up, Roy; it’s our goddamn superior intelligence!”

— Philip K. Dick

465. “Maybe there’s a machine in Berkeley that will save me, too. Perhaps my problems can be automated out of existence.”

— Philip K. Dick

466. “His thoughts,” Helio said, “are as clear as plastic to me, and mine likewise to him. We are both prisoners, Mister, in a hostile land.” At that Arnie laughed loud and long. “Truth always amuses the ignorant,” Helio said.”

— Philip K. Dick

467. “Nobody should lead mankind. It should lead itself.”

— Philip K. Dick

468. “Having nothing else to do or think about, he began to work out theoretically the life cycle of the bugs, and, with the aid of the Britannica, try to determine specifically which bugs they were.”

— Philip K. Dick

469. “Maybe, he pondered as he ascended the stairs, that’s my problem with Kathy. I can’t remember our combined past: can’t recall the days when we voluntarily lived with each other... now it’s become an involuntary arrangement, derived God knows how from the past.”

— Philip K. Dick

470. “Worse still, he had failed to pass the minimum mental faculties test, which made him in popular parlance a chickenhead.”

— Philip K. Dick

471. “Insane people – psychologically defined, not legally define – are not in touch with reality.”

— Philip K. Dick

472. “It is therapeutic to meet these people who have intimidated you. And to discover what they are really like. Then the intimidation goes.”

— Philip K. Dick

473. “It was hell living in the twenty-first century. Information transfer had reached the velocity of light.”

— Philip K. Dick

474. “Parcifal is one of those corkscrew artifact of culture in which you get the subjective sense that you’ve learned something from it, something valuable or even priceless; but on closer inspection you suddenly begin to scratch your head and say “Wait a minute. This makes no sense.”

— Philip K. Dick

475. “Guilt is useless. The world torments us, and we react by tormenting ourselves. I wonder how we can ever have such a low opinion of ourselves that we join in.”

— Philip K. Dick

476. “He stopped to look around. Everything was silent.”

— Philip K. Dick

477. “His projected face bony and intense, Garth peered out of his booth like an aroused turtle.”

— Philip K. Dick

478. “Dr. Leon Stone turned out to be one of the most important people in Horselover Fat’s life. To get to Stone, Fat had to nearly kill himself physically, matching his mental death. Is this what they mean about God’s mysterious ways? How else could Fat have linked up with Leon Stone? Only some dismal act of the order of a suicide attempt, a truly lethal attempt, would have achieved it; Fat had to die, or nearly die, to be cured. Or nearly cured.”

— Philip K. Dick

479. “Most self-indulgent of all Nazis, and is in sharp contrast to late H. Himmler, who lived in personal want at low salary. Herr Goring representative of spoils mentality, using power as means of acquiring personal wealth. Primitive mentality, even vulgar, but quite intelligent man, possibly most intelligent of all Nazi chiefs. Object of his drives: self-glorification in ancient emperor fashion.”

— Philip K. Dick

480. “How can justice fall victim, ever, to what is right?”

— Philip K. Dick

481. “I mean, knowing people, people are terrified of the unknown and they want to just kill the unknown.”

— Philip K. Dick

482. “Emptiness. He saw no one, only a large chamber with pewlike rows of seats and, at the far end, a casket surrounded by flowers. Off in a small sideroom an old-fashioned reed pump organ and a few wooden folding chairs. The mortuary smelled of dust and flowers, a sweet, stale mixture that repelled him. Think of all the Iowans, the thought, who’ve embraced eternity in this listless room.”

— Philip K. Dick

483. “Retrograde time is forward time which has passed the turning point; then as it turns back it is freighted with the load of accumulated knowledge. It is information rich. Logically, then, in its retrograde tracking, it would divest itself of its knowledge: teach rather than learn, so that when it arrived at the other end, it would be information poor, even info empty.”

— Philip K. Dick

484. “Everything’s the same, when you break through to absolute reality; it’s all one vast blur.”

— Philip K. Dick

485. “In wretched little lives like that, someone must intervene. Or at least mark their sad comings and goings. Mark and if possible permanently record so they’ll be remembered. For a better day, later on, when people will understand.”

— Philip K. Dick

486. “It’s amazing the limitation of the human anatomy, the fact that food and air must share a common passage.”

— Philip K. Dick

487. “Being crazy and getting caught at it, out in the open, turns out to be a way to wind up in jail.”

— Philip K. Dick

488. “If this place were closer to Terra there’d be empty beer cans and plastic plates strewn around. The trees would be gone. There’d be old jet motors in the water. The beaches would stink to high heaven. Terran Development would have a couple of million little plastic houses set up everywhere.”

— Philip K. Dick

489. “Oh no,” she said, still smiling; her eyes poured over with light, that of compassion. She understood how he felt, that this was not an impulse only. But the answer was still no, and, he knew, it would always.”

— Philip K. Dick

490. “Subordinate of H. Himmler, may have played role in Himmler’s not yet fully explained death in 1948.”

— Philip K. Dick

491. “Are we to assist it in gaining power in order to save our lives? Is that the paradox of our earthly situation?”

— Philip K. Dick

492. “Amazing, the power of fiction, even cheap popular fiction, to evoke.”

— Philip K. Dick

493. “Another fantasy film rolled suddenly into his head, without his consent:.”

— Philip K. Dick

494. “I got you out of the police barracks the best way I could,” a male voice – the same that Joe had heard on the radio – said. “A strange way,” Joe said. “To you strange. Strange to me have been a number of things you’ve done since the time I first became aware of you.” Joe said, “Like giving away my coins.” “No, I understood that. What strikes me as odd is your having sat for all those months in your work cubicle, waiting.”

— Philip K. Dick

495. “Baritone, cultivated, rolling-out-smooth voice familiar to Reiss. ‘This is Doktor Goebbels.”

— Philip K. Dick

496. “Philosophical involvement blinded me to authentic human fact.”

— Philip K. Dick

497. “But before we could continue the war, it was necessary to analyze it to determine what its purpose was. We did this, and we found that it had no purpose, except, perhaps, in terms of human needs. Even this was questionable.”

— Philip K. Dick

498. “The Public School, he had long ago decided, was neurotic. It wanted a world in which nothing new came about, in which there were no surprises. And that was the world of the compulsive-obsessive neurotic; it was not a healthy world at all.”

— Philip K. Dick

499. “I’ve read the Cosmic Trigger and Robert Anton Wilson says.”

— Philip K. Dick

500. “Tears began to surge up into her eyes, and she found herself doubling up her fists, with the thumbs inside, as she had done as a child; she felt her jaw wobble, and when she spoke her voice could hardly be heard.”

— Philip K. Dick