Top 500 Philip K. Dick Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Everyone dwelt in it without realizing it. The Black Iron Prison was their world.”

— Philip K. Dick

152. “The tyranny of an object, he thought. It doesn’t know I exist.”

— Philip K. Dick

153. “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

154. “Joe Chip said, ‘I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”

— Philip K. Dick

155. “In the center of an irrational universe governed by an irrational Mind stands rational man.”

— Philip K. Dick

156. “Most of the masses still believe in magic, you know. Spells. Potions. It’s a big business, I am told.”

— Philip K. Dick

157. “Do androids dream? Rick asked himself. Evidently; that’s why they occasionally kill their employers and flee here. A better life, without servitude. Like Luba Luft; singing Don Giovanni and Le Nozze instead of toiling across the face of a barren rock-strewn field. On a fundamentally uninhabitable colony world.”

— Philip K. Dick

158. “Mercerism isn’t finished,” Isidore said. Something ailed the three androids, something terrible. The spider, he thought. Maybe it had been the last spider on Earth, as Roy Baty said. And the spider is gone; Mercer is gone; he saw the dust and the ruin of the apartment as it lay spreading out everywhere – he heard the kipple coming, the final disorder of all forms, the absence which would win out.”

— Philip K. Dick

159. “My life and creative work are justified and completed by Blade Runner.”

— Philip K. Dick

160. “She was a redhead and he liked redheads; they were either outrageously ugly or almost supernaturally attractive.”

— Philip K. Dick

161. “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

162. “Instant Ubik has all the fresh flavor of just-brewed drip coffee. Your husband will say, Christ, Sally, I used to think your coffee was only so-so. But now, wow! Safe when taken as directed.”

— Philip K. Dick

163. “Upon him the contempt of three planets descended.”

— Philip K. Dick

164. “We did not fall because of a moral error; we fell because of an intellectual error: that of taking the phenomenal world as real. Therefore we are morally innocent.”

— Philip K. Dick

165. “The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”

— Philip K. Dick

166. “We are in a maze which we built, and then we fell into, now can’t get out. To make the game into something real, something more than merely an intellectual exercise, we elected to lose our exceptional faculties, to reduce us an entire level. This unfortunately, includes a loss of memory.”

— Philip K. Dick

167. “What a job to have to do, Rick thought. I’m a scourge, like famine or plague. Where I go the ancient curse follows. As Mercer said, I am required to do wrong. Everything I’ve done has been wrong from the start. Anyhow, now it’s time to go home. Maybe after I’ve been there awhile with Iran, I’ll forget.”

— Philip K. Dick

168. “It is the human phosphene response to full-spectrum white, to pure sunlight.”

— Philip K. Dick

169. “But then I realized how unhealthy it was, sensing the absence of life, not just in this building but everywhere, and not reacting – do you see? I guess you don’t. But that used to be considered a sign of mental illness; they called it ’absence of appropriate affect.”

— Philip K. Dick

170. “It is as if one hemisphere of your brain is perceiving the world as reflected in a mirror. Through a mirror. See? So left becomes right, and all that that implies. And we don’t know yet what that does imply, to see the world reversed like that. Topologically speaking, a left-hand glove is a right-hand glove pulled through infinity.”

— Philip K. Dick

171. “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

172. “The Mind is not talking to us but by means of us. Its narrative passes through us and its sorrow infuses us irrationally. As Plato discerned, there is a streak of the irrational in the World Soul.”

— Philip K. Dick

173. “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

174. “Freiherr Hugo Reiss made a notation on his pad. Broach subject with SS General Otto Skorzeny, or better yet Otto Ohlendorf at Amt III of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt. Didn’t Ohlendorf head Einsatzgruppe D?”

— Philip K. Dick

175. “Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair.”

— Philip K. Dick

176. “Despair like that, about total reality, is self-perpetuating.”

— Philip K. Dick

177. “Her voice had become sharp with overtones of bleakness as her soul congealed and she ceased to move, as the instinctive, omnipresent film of great weight, of an almost absolute inertia, settled over her.”

— Philip K. Dick

178. “To himself he thought, I was born in the wrong century. A hundred years ago this wouldn’t have happened and a hundred years from now it will be illegal.”

— Philip K. Dick

179. “You stupid bastard, does what you’re fighting for look so real now? Skin pigment. What a laugh! Why not eye color? Too bad nobody ever thought of that. It cuts it a little finer, but basically it’s the same thing.”

— Philip K. Dick

180. “The human society has evolved war as a cultural institution, like the science of astronomy, or mathematics. War is a part of our lives, a career, a respected vocation. Bright, alert young men and women move into it, putting their shoulders to the wheel as they did in the time of Nebuchadnezzar. It has always been so.”

— Philip K. Dick

181. “Anti-cat is one jump away from anti-Semitism.”

— Philip K. Dick

182. “I mean, after all; you have to consider we’re only made out of dust. That’s admittedly not much to go and we shouldn’t forget that. But even considering, I mean it’s sort of a bad beginning, we’re not doing too bad. So I personally have fath that even in this lousy situation we’re face with we can make it. You get it? ” – From an interoffice audio-memo circulated to Pre-Fash level consultants at Perky Pat Layout’s, Inc, dicted by Leo Bulero immediately on his return from Mars.”

— Philip K. Dick

183. “Maybe there was once a human who looked like you, and somewhere along the line you killed him and took his place. And your superiors don’t know.”

— Philip K. Dick

184. “Okay, I’ll come back again on Thursday.”

— Philip K. Dick

185. “The Christian-Islamic Church, of course, wanted both the Bible and the Koran frozen forever.”

— Philip K. Dick

186. “First, strangely, the owls had died. At the time it had seemed almost funny, the fat, fluffy white birds lying here and there, in yards and on streets; coming out no earlier than twilight as they had while alive the owls escaped notice.”

— Philip K. Dick

187. “As long as some creature experienced joy, then the condition for all other creatures included a fragment of joy. However, if any living being suffered, then for all the rest the shadow could not be entirely cast off. A herd animal such as man would acquire a higher survival factor through this; an owl or a cobra would be destroyed.”

— Philip K. Dick

188. “If I’m an andy,” Phil Resch said, “and you kill me, you can have my squirrel. Here; I’ll write it out, willing it to you.”

— Philip K. Dick

189. “She’ll probably want to, once I show her how; as near as I can make out, most women, even young ones like her, like to cook: it’s an instinct.”

— Philip K. Dick

190. “So although I heard the emptiness intellectually, I didn’t feel it. My first reaction consisted of being grateful that we could afford a Penfield mood organ. But then I realized how unhealthy it was, sensing the absence of life, not just in this building but everywhere, and not reacting – do you see? I guess you don’t. But that used to be considered a sign of mental illness; they called it ’absence of appropriate affect.”

— Philip K. Dick

191. “This rehearsal will end, the performance will end, the singers will die, eventually the last score of music will be destroyed in one wya or another; finally the name “Mozart” will vanish, the dust will have won. If not on this planet then another. We can evade it awhile.”

— Philip K. Dick

192. “Imagine being sentient but not alive. Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognizing but not being alive. A person can die and still go on. Sometimes what looks out at you from a person’s eyes maybe died back in childhood. What’s dead in there still looks out. It’s not just the body looking at you with nothing in it; there’s still something in there but it died and just keeps on looking and looking;.”

— Philip K. Dick

193. “The past is latent, is submerged, but still there, capable of rising to the surface once the later imprinting unfortunately – and against ordinary experience – vanished. The man contains – not the boy – but earlier men, he thought. History began a long time ago.”

— Philip K. Dick

194. “Mental illness is not funny.”

— Philip K. Dick

195. “That’s because you’re a highly moral person. I’m not. I don’t judge, not even myself.”

— Philip K. Dick

196. “He thought, too, about his need for a real animal; within him an actual hatred once more manifested itself toward his electric sheep, which he had to tend, had to care about, as if it lived. The tyranny of an object, he thought. It doesn’t know I exist. Like the androids, it had no ability to appreciate the existence of another.”

— Philip K. Dick

197. “Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.”

— Philip K. Dick

198. “You never see the ones who really love you and help you; you’re always involved with strangers.”

— Philip K. Dick

199. “The universe will never be extinguished because just when the darkness seems to have smothered all, to be truly transcendent, the new seeds of light are reborn in the very depths. That is the Way. When the seed falls, it falls into the earth, into the soil. And beneath, out of sight, it comes to life.”

— Philip K. Dick

200. “It’s the fault of those physicists and that synchronicity theory, every particle being connected with every other; you can’t fart without changing the balance in the universe. It makes living a funny joke with nobody around to laugh.”

— Philip K. Dick