Top 500 Philip K. Dick Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Life is short, he thought. Art, or something not life, is long, stretching out endless, like concrete worm. Flat, white, unsmoothed by any passage over or across it. Here I stand. But no longer. Taking the small box, he put the Edfrank jewellery piece away in his coat pocket.”

— Philip K. Dick

252. “I’ve been waiting a long time for last year. But I guess it’s just not coming again.”

— 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. “Even if all life on our planet is destroyed, there must be other life somewhere which we know nothing of. It is impossible that ours is the only world; there must be world after world unseen by us, in some region or dimension that we simply do not percieve.”

— Philip K. Dick

255. “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

256. “It’s all on the surface. Advantage of wealth and power makes this available to them, but it’s ersatz as the day is long.”

— Philip K. Dick

257. “We really do see astigmatically, in fundamental sense: our space and time creations of our own psyche and when these momentarily falter – like acute disturbance of middle ear. Occasionally we list eccentrically, all sense of balance gone.”

— Philip K. Dick

258. “It is their sense of space and time. 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.”

— Philip K. Dick

259. “It is only through the breakdown of his ordinary reality that he can be in-formed by the suprasensual reality of the divine letter: the Logos. Here, as in the famous opening of the Gospel of John – “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God” – language becomes an “active agent” that is actually prior to material reality.”

— Philip K. Dick

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

281. “After he saw God he felt really good, for around a year. And then he felt really bad. Worse than he ever had before in his life. Because one day it came over him, he began to realize, that he was never going to see God again; he was going to live out his whole remaining life, decades, maybe fifty years, and see nothing but what he had always seen. What we see. He was worse off than if he hadn’t seen God.”

— Philip K. Dick

282. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

285. “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

286. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

291. “Never walk over a writer, I said to myself, unless you’re positive he can’t rise up behind you. If you’re going to burn him, make sure he’s dead. Because if he’s alive, he will talk: talk in written form, on the printed, permanent page.”

— Philip K. Dick

292. “One more in a long line, a dreary entity among many others like him, an almost endless number of brain-damaged retards. Biological life goes on, he thought. But the soul, the mind – everything else is dead. A reflex machine. Like some insect. Repeating doomed patterns, a single pattern, over and over now. Appropriate or not.”

— Philip K. Dick

293. “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

294. “Herr Konsul, sorry to take your time.” A man’s voice. The blood in Reiss’ veins instantly stopped its motion.”

— Philip K. Dick

295. “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

296. “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

297. “Listen, I’m not an intellectual – Fascism has no need of that. What is wanted is the deed. Theory derives from action. What our corporate state demands from us is comprehension of the social forces – of history.”

— Philip K. Dick

298. “The dissatisfaction of the masses is not based on economic deprivation but on a sense of ineffectually. Not an increased standard of living, but more social power, is their fundamental goal, because of their emotional orientation, they arise and act when a powerful leader-figure can coordinate them into a functioning unit rather than a chaotic mass of unformed elements. Dill.”

— Philip K. Dick

299. “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

300. “What you teach is the word of man. Man is holy, and the true god, the living god, is man himself. You will have no gods but yourselves; the days in which you believed in other gods end now, they end forever.”

— Philip K. Dick