Top 500 Philip K. Dick Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “You will have to stop searching for me because l will never stop searching for you.”

— Philip K. Dick

452. “Religion, Sebastian thought wearily. More ins and outs, more angles, than ordinary commerce.”

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

454. “I hope I never get in a fix like that,” Taubman said. “Hating someone I once loved.”

— Philip K. Dick

455. “They’re not idealists like Joe and me; they’re cynics with utter faith. It’s a sort of brain defect, like a lobotomy – that.”

— Philip K. Dick

456. “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

457. “When you attack a tyranny you must expect it to fight back.”

— Philip K. Dick

458. “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

459. “But in the end I decided against it. The hell with the newspapers. Nobody reads the letters to the editor column except more nuts. The whole world is full of nuts. It’s enough to get you down.”

— Philip K. Dick

460. “We talked for a while about the area, and then I told Nat about a paper I had written in college about the Roman general Stilicho.”

— Philip K. Dick

461. “All responsible writers, to some degree, have become involuntary criers of doom, because doom is in the wind.”

— Philip K. Dick

462. “The little man with beard and glasses leaped up. ‘There’s nobody here has anything to do with governments! We’re all good people!”

— Philip K. Dick

463. “It was on the order of coin or stamp collecting; no rational explanation could ever be given. And high prices were being paid by wealthy collectors.”

— Philip K. Dick

464. “But an artist, he realized. Or rather so-called artist. Bohemian. That’s closer to it. The artistic life without the talent.”

— Philip K. Dick

465. “Nothing is true.”

— Philip K. Dick

466. “Typical of their mania for the trivial, their legalistic fascination with documents, proclamations, ads.”

— Philip K. Dick

467. “Without war the lower elements of mankind have increased all out of proportion. They threaten the educated few, those with scientific knowledge and training, the ones equipped to direct society. They have no regard for science or a scientific society, based on reason. And this Movement seeks to aid and abet them. Only when scientists are in full control can the –.”

— Philip K. Dick

468. “Caroline said, “She’s terribly, terribly disruptive.” “So is reality,” Hawthorne said.”

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

472. “But change’s always harsh on the loser. Nothing new.”

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

476. “Simple Shepherd Mortuary.”

— Philip K. Dick

477. “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

478. “It meant that you were seeing into absolute reality. The essence beyond the mere appearance.” In your terminology, he thought, what you saw is called – stigmata.”

— Philip K. Dick

479. “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

480. “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

481. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

486. “It sounds like they’re saying passive life is good, he thought. But there is no such thing as passive life. That’s a contradiction.”

— Philip K. Dick

487. “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

488. “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

489. “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

490. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

493. “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

494. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

496. “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

497. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

500. “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