Top 500 Philip K. Dick Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “Look, Haley’s comet!”

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

453. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

455. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

457. “She sighed. “Oh, God, to be in the flyship cruising through the void. That’s what I long for: an infinite void. With no human voices, no human smells, no human jaws masticating plastic chewing gum in nine iridescent colors.”

— Philip K. Dick

458. “They ought to make it a binding clause that if you find God you get to keep Him.”

— Philip K. Dick

459. “How long that part of the cycle had lasted he did not now know; nothing had happened, generally, so it had been measureless.”

— Philip K. Dick

460. “Fat had phoned his pharmacy somewhere along the line to get a refill on his Librium prescription; he had taken thirty Librium just before taking the digitalis. The pharmacist had contacted the paramedics. A lot can be said for the infinite mercies of God, but the smarts of a good pharmacist, when you get down to it, is worth more.”

— Philip K. Dick

461. “You will have to stop searching for me because l will never stop searching for you.”

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

466. “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

467. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

469. “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

470. “Nothing is true.”

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

472. “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

473. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

475. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

481. “Simple Shepherd Mortuary.”

— Philip K. Dick

482. “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

483. “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

484. “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

485. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

488. “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

489. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

493. “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

494. “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

495. “Plastics. Polyesters. Resins. Ersatz – industrial uses. Do you see? No consumers’ commodities.”

— Philip K. Dick

496. “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

497. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

499. “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

500. “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