Top 500 Philip K. Dick Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Random, and yet rooted in the moment in which he lived, in which his life was bound up with all other lives and particles in the universe.”

— Philip K. Dick

252. “And this is the straight dope, right here. These people are not exactly human. They don the dress but they’re like monkeys dolled up in the circus. They’re clever and can learn, but that is all.”

— Philip K. Dick

253. “My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression,” Iran said. “What? Why did you schedule that?” It defeated the whole purpose of the mood organ. “I didn’t even know you could set it for that,” he said gloomily.”

— Philip K. Dick

254. “Who threw the stone at me? he asked himself. No one. But why does it bother me? I’ve undergone it before, during fusion. While using my empathy box, like everyone else. This isn’t new. But it was. Because, he thought, I did it alone.”

— Philip K. Dick

255. “No man is infinitely strong; for every creature that runs, flies, hops or crawls there is a terminal nemesis which he will not circumvent, which will finally do him in.”

— Philip K. Dick

256. “He could see the tall, peeling yellow building at the periphery of his range of vision. But something about it struck him as strange. A shimmer, an unsteadiness, as if the building faded forward into stability and then retreated into insubstantial uncertainty. An oscillation, each phase lasting a few seconds and then blurring off into its opposite, a fairly regular variability as if an organic pulsation underlay the structure. As if, he thought, it’s alive.”

— Philip K. Dick

257. “It’s all a big racket; they’re playing it on themselves. I mean, a gun goes through a famous battle, like the Meuse-Argonne, and it’s the same as if it hadn’t, unless you know. It’s in here.′ He tapped his head. ‘In the mind, not the gun.”

— Philip K. Dick

258. “Do you know what the true basis of political power is? Not guns or troops but the ability to get others to do what you want them to do. By whatever means are appropriate.”

— Philip K. Dick

259. “Death at each moment, one avenue which is open to us at any point. And eventually we choose it, in spite of ourselves. Or we give up and take it deliberately.”

— Philip K. Dick

260. “They were a form of mutated twinning, joined at the base of the skull so that a single cephalic structure served both separate bodies. Evidently the personality George inhabited one hemisphere of the brain, made use of one eye: the right, as he recalled. And the personality Walt existed on the other side, distinct with its own idiosyncrasies, views and drives – and its own eye from which to view the outside universe.”

— Philip K. Dick

261. “Sheep are funny,” the Whitlock said. “Now, you look at how they behave when you throw some grub over the fence to them, such as corn stalks. Why, they’ll spot that from a mile away.” The Whitlock chuckled. “They’re smart when it comes to what concerns them. And maybe that helps us see what true smartness is; it isn’t having read a lot of big books, or knowing long words... it’s being able to spot what’s to our advantage. It’s got to be useful to be real smartness.”

— Philip K. Dick

262. “Every junkie, he thought, is a recording.”

— Philip K. Dick

263. “One of these days,” Joe said wrathfully, “people like me will rise up and overthrow you, and the end of tyranny by the homeostatic machine will have arrived. The day of human values and compassion and simple warmth will return, and when that happens someone like myself who has gone through an ordeal and who genuinely needs hot coffee to pick him up and keep him functioning when he has to function will get the hot coffee whether he happens to have a postcred readily available or not.”

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

265. “While translated one could commit incest, murder, anything, and it remained from a juridical standpoint a mere fantasy, an impotent wish only.”

— Philip K. Dick

266. “He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”

— Philip K. Dick

267. “Office gossip annoyed him because it always proved better than the truth.”

— Philip K. Dick

268. “On some other world, possibly it is different. Better. There are clear good and evil alternatives. Not these obscure admixtures, these blends, with no proper tool by which to untangle the components. We do not have the 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

269. “Pascal said, “All history is one immortal man who continually learns.”

— Philip K. Dick

270. “People have told me that everything about me, every facet of my life, psyche, experiences, dreams, and fears, are laid out explicitly in my writing, that from the corpus of my work I can be absolutely and precisely inferred. This is true.”

— Philip K. Dick

271. “That I am in direct mind-to-mind touch with extraterrestrial intelligence systems has been obvious to me for some time, but what this means is not in any way obvious.”

— Philip K. Dick

272. “I seem to be living in my own novels more and more. I can’t figure out why. Am I losing touch with reality? Or is reality actually sliding toward a Phil Dickian type of atmosphere? And if the latter, then for god’s sake why? Am I responsible? How could I be responsible? Isn’t that solipsism? It’s too much for me.”

— Philip K. Dick

273. “When has the government ever told anyone the truth?”

— Philip K. Dick

274. “I wonder, he wondered, if any human has ever felt this way before about an android.”

— Philip K. Dick

275. “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

276. “He entered the elevator and together they moved closer to god.”

— Philip K. Dick

277. “I could see why she felt attracted to Sam K. Barrows. Birds of a feather, or rather lizards of a scale.”

— Philip K. Dick

278. “Purpose of life is unknown, and hence way to be is hidden from the eyes of living critters. Who can say if perhaps the schizophrenics are not correct? Mister, they take a brave journey. They turn away from mere things, which one may handle and turn to practical use; they turn inward to meaning. There, the black-night-without-bottom lies, the pit. Who can say if they will return? And if so, what will they be like, having glimpsed meaning? I admire them.”

— Philip K. Dick

279. “But if that’s Olham, then I must be...”

— Philip K. Dick

280. “What do you want? Egg in your beer?”

— Philip K. Dick

281. “If you’ll remember, helping people was one of the two basic things Fat has been told long ago to give up; helping people and taking dope. He had stopped taking dope, but all his energy and enthusiasm were now totally channeled into saving people. Better he had kept on with the dope.”

— Philip K. Dick

282. “Let it be said that one of the first symptoms of psychosis is that the person feels perhaps he is becoming psychotic.”

— Philip K. Dick

283. “They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history. They identify with God’s power and believe they are godlike. That is their basic madness. They are overcome by some archtype; their egos have expanded psychotically so that they cannot tell where they begin and the godhead leaves off. It is not hubris, not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate – confusion between him who worships and that which is worshipped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.”

— Philip K. Dick

284. “The terrible dilemma of our lives. Whatever happens, it is evil beyond compare. Why struggle, then? Why choose? If all alternatives are the same...”

— Philip K. Dick

285. “Fear,” Jason said, “can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy. If you’re afraid you don’t commit yourself to life completely; fear makes you always, always hold something back.”

— Philip K. Dick

286. “I used to condemn junkies, like they could get off the stuff if they really wanted to, and that is just as stupid as saying, “You could grow eyes in the back of your head if you really wanted to.”

— Philip K. Dick

287. “In a nutshell-I fear authority but at the same time I resent it-the authority and my own fear. So I rebel.”

— Philip K. Dick

288. “You know that recent Supreme Court ruling where a husband can legally murder his wife if he can prove she wouldn’t under any circumstances give him a divorce?”

— Philip K. Dick

289. “What a tragic realm this is, he reflected. Those down here are prisoners, and the ultimate tragedy is that they don’t know it; they think they are free because they have never been free, and do not understand what it means.”

— Philip K. Dick

290. “A paranoiac, my friend, is a person who has gone crazy in the most intelligent, well-informed way, the world being what it is. The paranoiac believes that great secret conspiracies are afoot to destroy him.”

— Philip K. Dick

291. “There are people among us who are biologically human but who are androids in the metaphoric sense.”

— Philip K. Dick

292. “The rule of survival, he thought. Keep eye peeled regarding situation around you. Learn its demands. And- meet them. Be there at the right time doing the right thing.”

— Philip K. Dick

293. “I never felt this way before. We are machines, stamped out like bottle caps. It’s an illusion that I – I personally – really exist; I’m just representative of a type.”

— Philip K. Dick

294. “If you boys are psychologist types and you’ve been listening to my endless debriefings with Hank, what the hell is Donna’s handle? How do I get next to her? I mean, how is it done? With that kind of sweet, unique, stubborn little chick?”

— Philip K. Dick

295. “But look at the aspirations of that rabbit and look at his failing. A little life trying. And all the time it was hopeless. But the rabbit didn’t know that. Or maybe did know and kept trying anyhow. But I think he didn’t understand. He just wanted to do it so badly. It was his whole life, because he loved the cats.”

— Philip K. Dick

296. “When you are Atlas you must carry a heavy load and if you drop it a lot of people suffer...”

— Philip K. Dick

297. “Frankly, you look more like a goat man to me.”

— Philip K. Dick

298. “You must beware of seeing malice behind accidental injury.”

— Philip K. Dick

299. “The sane man does not know that everything is possible.” In other words, the mentally ill person at one time or another knew too much. And, as a result, so to speak, his head shut down.”

— Philip K. Dick

300. “When you attack a tyranny you must expect it to fight back. Why not? Why shouldn’t it?”

— Philip K. Dick