Top 500 Philip K. Dick Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “All responsible writers, to some degree, have become involuntary criers of doom, because doom is in the wind.”

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

453. “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

454. “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

455. “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

456. “Human beings had invented war, invented and manufactured the weapons, even invented the players, the fighters, the actors of the war. But they themselves could not venture forth, could not wage it themselves.”

— Philip K. Dick

457. “They know a million tricks, those novelists.”

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

459. “Entering the phone booth, he did a phone thing.”

— Philip K. Dick

460. “Of course, he snuck all this in under the guise of pulp science fiction, baiting us into believing that maybe this is all just fantasy. Only once the story is over, and we take another look at the world around us, do we realize: It’s all completely true.”

— Philip K. Dick

461. “Yes, these new young people, of the rising generation, who did not remember the days before the war or even the war itself – they were the hope of the world.”

— Philip K. Dick

462. “This bowl of milk, the pitch on yonder jar, are strange and far-bound travelers come from far.”

— Philip K. Dick

463. “Look, Haley’s comet!”

— Philip K. Dick

464. “We should take mothers in high seas and drown them there, they are as poisonous as lead in the air.”

— Philip K. Dick

465. “This guy – Joe whatever – hasn’t even got the right expression on his face; he should have that cold but somehow enthusiastic look, as if he believed in nothing and yet somehow had absolute faith.”

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

467. “And what good was a political strategist who couldn’t look ahead to his own death? Without that he would have been merely another Hitler, who didn’t want his country to survive him.”

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— 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. “Nothing is true.”

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

484. “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

485. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

487. “I’ve never found a live, wild animal. It must be a fantastic experience to look down and see something living scuttling along. Maybe it’ll happen someday to me like it did him.”

— Philip K. Dick

488. “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

489. “Prosperous, happy, fruitful... the Latin word “Felix” occurs in such injunctions as that by God himself, who in Genesis 1:21 says to all the creatures of the world, “Be fruitful and increase, fill the waters of the seas; and let the birds increase on land.” This is the essence of the meaning of Felix, this command from God, this loving command, this manifestation of his desire that we not only live but that we live happily and prosperously.”

— Philip K. Dick

490. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

492. “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

493. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

496. “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

497. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick