Top 500 Philip K. Dick Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “You think I’m suffering because I’m lonely.”

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

154. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

156. “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

157. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

168. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

170. “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

171. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

173. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

175. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

177. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

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

— Philip K. Dick

182. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

185. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

188. “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

189. “Only death can get us out of this and maybe not even death. Maybe it’s too late; we’ll carry this deterioration with us to the next life.”

— Philip K. Dick

190. “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

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

195. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

197. “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy.”

— Philip K. Dick

198. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

200. “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