Top 500 Philip K. Dick Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Ubik... Safe when taken as directed.”

— Philip K. Dick

102. “You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity.”

— Philip K. Dick

103. “Death makes me mad. Human and animal suffering make me mad; whenever one of my cats dies I curse God and I mean it; I feel fury at him. I’d like to get him here where I could interrogate him, tell him that I think the world is screwed up, that man didn’t sin and fall but was pushed – which is bad enough – but was then sold the lie that he is basically sinful, which I know he is not.”

— Philip K. Dick

104. “If the last to know he’s an addict is the addict, then maybe the last to know when a man means what he says is the man himself, he reflected.”

— Philip K. Dick

105. “It’s the basic condition of life to be required to violate our own identity.”

— Philip K. Dick

106. “The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than a razor’s edge, sharper than a hound’s tooth, more agile than a mule deer. It is more elusive than the merest phantom. Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it is a phantom.”

— Philip K. Dick

107. “Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves.”

— Philip K. Dick

108. “Sometimes I wish I knew how to go crazy. I forget how.”

— Philip K. Dick

109. “How’d you like to gaze at a beer can throughout eternity? It might not be so bad. There’d be nothing to fear.”

— Philip K. Dick

110. “The cries of the dead are terrible indeed; you should try not to hear them.”

— Philip K. Dick

111. “What profit it a man if he gain the whole world but in this enterprise lose his soul?”

— Philip K. Dick

112. “Everyone dwelt in it without realizing it. The Black Iron Prison was their world.”

— Philip K. Dick

113. “I never felt like that before. Maybe it could be depression, like you get. I can understand how you suffer now when you’re depressed; I always thought you liked it and I thought you could have snapped yourself out any time, if not alone then by means of the mood organ. But when you get that depressed you don’t care. Apathy, because you’ve lost a sense of worth. It doesn’t matter whether you feel better because you have no worth.”

— Philip K. Dick

114. “If practicality and morality are polarized and you must choose, you must do what you think is right, rather than what you think is practical.”

— Philip K. Dick

115. “The silence of the world could not rein back it’s greed. Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won.”

— Philip K. Dick

116. “They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed – run over, maimed, destroyed – but they continued to play anyhow.”

— Philip K. Dick

117. “Mankind needs more empathy.”

— Philip K. Dick

118. “We do not have an ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious.”

— Philip K. Dick

119. “Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community, whereas intelligence to some degree could be found throughout every phylum and order including the arachnida.”

— Philip K. Dick

120. “Activity does not necessarily mean life. Quasars are active. And a monk meditating is not inanimate.”

— Philip K. Dick

121. “No weapon has ever been frightful enough to put a stop to war – perhaps because we never before had any that thought for themselves.”

— Philip K. Dick

122. “Even weird breed of cat like Nazi Germany comprehensible to I Ching.”

— Philip K. Dick

123. “We are served by organic ghosts, he thought, who, speaking and writing, pass through this our new environment. Watching, wise, physical ghosts from the full-life world, elements of which have become for us invading but agreeable splinters of a substance that pulsates like a former heart.”

— Philip K. Dick

124. “Men and the world are mutually toxic to each other.”

— Philip K. Dick

125. “Amazed, Fat said, “She’s decomposing and yet she’s still giving birth?” “Only to monsters,” Dr. Stone said.”

— Philip K. Dick

126. “Arnie Kott owned the only harpsichord on Mars. However, it was out of tune, and he could find no one to service it. No matter which way you cut it, there were no harpsichord tuners on Mars.”

— Philip K. Dick

127. “Should we have a leader or should we think for ourselves? Obviously the latter in principle. But-sometimes there lies a gulf between what is theoretically right and that which is practical.”

— Philip K. Dick

128. “A Gresham’s Law: the fakes would undermine the value of the real.”

— Philip K. Dick

129. “We can only control the end by making a choice at each step.”

— Philip K. Dick

130. “Any given man sees only a tiny portion of the total truth, and very often, in fact almost perpetually, he deliberately deceives himself about that little precious fragment as well. A portion of him turns against him and acts like another person, defeating him from inside. A man inside a man. Which is no man at all.”

— Philip K. Dick

131. “Can anyone alter fate? All of us combined... or one great figure... or someone strategically placed, who happens to be in the right spot. Chance. Accident. And our lives, our world, hanging on it.”

— Philip K. Dick

132. “He didn’t just know there would be personal computers. He knew they would crash, that the people who came to fix them would charge heavily by the hour, and be annoying, and no good, and in the end would just tell you to buy a new and more expensive machine –.”

— Philip K. Dick

133. “We have entered a Moment when we are alone. We cannot get assistance, as before. Well, Mr. Tagomi thought, perhaps that too is good. Or can be made good. One must still try to find the Way.”

— Philip K. Dick

134. “She makes life over, he realized. She controls life, whereas I just sit on my can and let it happen to me.”

— Philip K. Dick

135. “He started keeping a journal – had been, in fact, secretly doing so for some time: the furtive act of a deranged person.”

— Philip K. Dick

136. “The hell with the newspapers. Nobody reads the letters to the editor column except the nuts. It’s enough to get you down.”

— Philip K. Dick

137. “They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life. Because eventually there will be no life; there was once only the dust particles in space, the hot hydrogen gases, nothing more, and it will come again. This is an interval, ein Augenblick. The cosmic process is hurrying on, crushing life back into granite and methane; the wheel turns for all life. It is all temporary.”

— Philip K. Dick

138. “We live with illusion daily, he reflected. When the first bard rattled off the first epic of a sometime battle, illusion entered our lives; the Iliad is as much a “fake” as those robant children trading postage stamps on the porch of the building. Humans have always striven to retain the past, to keep it convincing; there’s nothing wicked in that. Without it we have no continuity; we have only the moment. And, deprived of the past, the moment – the present – has little meaning, if any.”

— Philip K. Dick

139. “But the actual touch of her lingered, inside his heart. That remained. In all the years of his life ahead, the long years without her, with never seeing her or hearing from her or knowing anything about her, if she was alive or happy or dead or what, that touch stayed locked within him, sealed in himself, and never went away. That one touch of her hand.”

— Philip K. Dick

140. “Insanity – to have to construct a picture of one’s life, by making inquiries of others.”

— Philip K. Dick

141. “In the absence of the Batys and Pris he found himself fading out, becoming strangely like the inert television set which he had just unplugged. You have to be with other people, he thought. In order to live at all. I mean, before they came here I could stand it, being alone in the building. But now it’s changed. You can’t go back, he thought. You can’t go from people to nonpeople.”

— Philip K. Dick

142. “It’s – it’s a variable.” Kaplan was shaking, white-lipped and pale. “Something from which no inference can be made. The man from the past. The machines can’t deal with him. The variable man!”

— Philip K. Dick

143. “Half to himself, Fat said, “He causes things to look different so it would appear time has passed.”

— Philip K. Dick

144. “The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three-dimensional and not space time. The information fed to us we hypostatize into the phenomenal world.”

— Philip K. Dick

145. “As the spring rains fall, soaking in them, on the roof, is a child’s rag ball.”

— Philip K. Dick

146. “The most dangerous kind of person... is one who is afraid of his own shadow.”

— Philip K. Dick

147. “What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me – into us – clearly or darkly?”

— Philip K. Dick

148. “We are all insects,” he said to Miss Ephreikian. “Groping toward something terrible or divine. Do you not agree?”

— Philip K. Dick

149. “Mors certa, vita incerta, as Mr. Sloat occasionally declared. Isidore, although he had heard the expression a number of times, retained only a dim notion as to its meaning. After all, if a chickenhead could fathom Latin he would cease to be a chickenhead.”

— Philip K. Dick

150. “A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard.”

— Philip K. Dick