Top 500 Philip K. Dick Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “In this particular lifestyle the motto is “Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying,” but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory.”

— Philip K. Dick

152. “Love isn’t just wanting another person the way you want to own an object you see in a store. That’s just desire. You want to have it around, take it home and set it up somewhere in the apartment like a lamp.”

— Philip K. Dick

153. “That goat,” Rachael said. “You love the goat more than me. More than you love your wife, probably. First the goat, then your wife, then last of all – ” She laughed merrily. “What can you do but laugh?”

— Philip K. Dick

154. “Kevin is right about his cat. It’s all there in his dead cat. The Great Judge can’t answer Kevin: ‘Why did my cat die?’ Answer: ‘Damned if I know.’ There is no answer; there is only a dead animal that just wanted to cross the street. We’re all animals that want to cross the street only something mows us down half-way across that we never saw.”

— Philip K. Dick

155. “Dio promette la vita eterna” disse Eldritch. “Io posso fare di meglio; posso metterla in commercio.”

— Philip K. Dick

156. “This is a cardboard universe, and if you lean too long or too heavily against it, you fall through.”

— Philip K. Dick

157. “So I left the TV sound off and I sat down at my mood organ and I experimented. And I finally found a setting for despair.” Her dark, pert face showed satisfaction, as if she had achieved something of worth. “So I put it on my schedule for twice a month; I think that’s a reasonable amount of time to feel hopeless about everything, about staying here on Earth after everybody who’s small has emigrated, don’t you think?”

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

159. “We must content ourselves with the mystery, the absurdity, the contradictions, the hostility, but also the generosity that our environment offers us. It’s not much, but it’s always better than the deadly, defeatist certainty of the paranoid.”

— 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. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

165. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

167. “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

168. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

170. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

174. “Ruth said, “Love isn’t just wanting another person the way you want to own an object you see in a store. That’s just desire. You want to have it around, take it home and set it up somewhere in the apartment like a lamp. Love is”-she paused, reflecting-“like a father saving his children from a burning house, getting them out and denying himself. When you love you cease to live for yourself; you live for another person.”

— Philip K. Dick

175. “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

176. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

178. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

180. “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

181. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

183. “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

184. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

186. “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

187. “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

188. “The end times were not the end times after all. The end times were always coming but never here, always nearby and influencing us but never realized.”

— Philip K. Dick

189. “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

190. “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

191. “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

192. “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

193. “Wake up to a hearty, lip-smacking bowlful of nutritious, nourishing Ubik toasted flakes, the adult cereal that’s more crunchy, more tasty, more ummmish. Ubik breakfast cereal, the whole-bowl taste treat!”

— Philip K. Dick

194. “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

195. “I almost passed the IQ test,” he said in a low, shaky voice.”

— Philip K. Dick

196. “I think great art should play a part in the ordinary man’s life, don’t you? It can make his existence so much richer and more meaningful.”

— Philip K. Dick

197. “Does this cure your depression?” he asked her. “It cures mine.” Iran said, “It certainly does cure my depression. Now we can admit to everybody that the sheep’s false.” “No need to do that,” he said cautiously. “But we can,” Iran persisted. “See, now we have nothing to hide; what we’ve always wanted has come true. It’s a dream!”

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

199. “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

200. “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