Top 500 Philip K. Dick Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 7 of 10

301. “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

302. “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

303. “It requires the greatest kind of wisdom, she thought, to know when to apply injustice. How can justice fall victim, even, to what is right?”

— Philip K. Dick

304. “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

305. “The gentle sounds of the choir singing “Amen, amen” are not to calm the congregation but to pacify the god.”

— Philip K. Dick

306. “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, A History of Nazi Germany, by William L. Shirer, Simon and Schuster, 1960, New York; Hitler, a Study in Tyranny, by Alan Bullock, Harper, 1953, New York;.”

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

308. “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

309. “You know how people are about not taking care of an animal; they consider it immoral and antiempathic. I mean, technically it’s not a crime like it was right after WWT but the feeling’s still there...”

— Philip K. Dick

310. “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

311. “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

312. “Life which we can no longer distinguish; life carefully buried up to its forehead in the carcass of a dead world. In every cinder of the universe Mercer probably perceives inconspicuous life. Now I know, he thought. And once having seen through Mercer’s eyes, I probably will never stop.”

— Philip K. Dick

313. “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

314. “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

315. “I’ve married before and it was no better, and if I divorce Kathy I’ll marry again – because as my brainbasher puts it I can’t find my identity outside the role of husband and daddy and big butter-and-egg-man wage earner – and the next damn one will be the same because that’s the kind I select. It’s rooted in my temperament.”

— Philip K. Dick

316. “With him inside the elevator descended.”

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

319. “Activity does not necessarily mean life.”

— Philip K. Dick

320. “You cook the native foods to perfection, Robert Childan thought. What they say is true: your powers of imitation are immense. Apple pie, Coca-Cola, stroll after the movie, Glenn Miller... you could paste together out of tin and rice paper a completely artificial America. Rice-paper Mom in the kitchen, rice-paper Dad reading the newspaper. Rice-paper put at his feet. Everything.”

— Philip K. Dick

321. “Yes, the novelist knows humanity, how worthless they are, ruled by their testicles, swayed by cowardice, selling out every cause because of their greed – all he’s got to do is thump on the drum, and there’s his response. And he laughing, of course, behind his hand at the effect he gets.”

— Philip K. Dick

322. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

324. “Owning and maintaining a fraud had a way of gradually demoralizing one.”

— Philip K. Dick

325. “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

326. “One cannot judge by book being best seller. We all know that. Many best sellers are terrible trash.”

— Philip K. Dick

327. “We have no value, she said to herself. We can live out our tiny lives. If we want to. If it matters to us.”

— Philip K. Dick

328. “Don’t pause and be philosophical, because from a philosophical standpoint it’s dreary. For us both.” He.”

— Philip K. Dick

329. “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

330. “Retrograde time is forward time which has passed the turning point; then as it turns back it is freighted with the load of accumulated knowledge. It is information rich. Logically, then, in its retrograde tracking, it would divest itself of its knowledge: teach rather than learn, so that when it arrived at the other end, it would be information poor, even info empty.”

— Philip K. Dick

331. “Little kids are that way; they feel if their parents aren’t watching what they do then what they do isn’t real.”

— Philip K. Dick

332. “This man is different. He can fix anything, do anything. He doesn’t work with knowledge, with science – the classified accumulation of facts. He knows nothing. It’s not in his head, a form of learning. He works by intuition – his power is in his hands, not his head. Jack-of-all-trades. His hands! Like a painter, an artist. In his hands – and he cuts across our lives like a knife-blade.”

— Philip K. Dick

333. “Those who take lives will lose their own. Those who kill, will die. But he who gives his own life away will live again!”

— Philip K. Dick

334. “He himself had had a psychotic interlude, in his early twenties. It was common. It was natural. And, he had to admit, it was horrible. It made the fixed, rigid, compulsive-neurotic Public School seem a reference point by which one could gratefully steer one’s course back to mankind and shared reality. It made him comprehend why a neurosis was a deliberate artifact, deliberately constructed by the ailing individual or by a society in crisis. It was an invention arising from necessity.”

— Philip K. Dick

335. “The human being has an unfortunate tendency to wish to please.”

— Philip K. Dick

336. “What he did not know then is that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane. To listen to Gloria rationally ask to die was to inhale the contagion. It was a Chinese finger trap, where the harder you pull to get out, the tighter the trap gets.”

— Philip K. Dick

337. “The termination of a relationship,” he said, “is not a misunderstanding. It’s a reorganization of life.”

— Philip K. Dick

338. “That there is no perfect defense. There is no protection. Being alive means being exposed; it’s the nature of life to be hazardous – it’s the stuff of living.”

— Philip K. Dick

339. “I feel the hot winds of karma driving me.”

— Philip K. Dick

340. “He felt the craving within him, the need to be entertained. And they all felt this way; the settlement yearned for the bizarre.”

— Philip K. Dick

341. “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

342. “But reality cannot be ignored; we must grow up.”

— Philip K. Dick

343. “Disturbed and upset, Mrs. Pritchet gazed mutely out the window of the car and systematically abolished various categories. Old farmhouses with tottering windmills ceased to be. Ancient rusty automobiles vanished from this version of the universe. Outhouses disappeared, along with dead trees, shabby barns, rubbish heaps and poorly-dressed itinerant fruit-pickers. “What’s.”

— Philip K. Dick

344. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

346. “But a mood like that,” Rick said, “you’re apt to stay in it, not dial your way out. Despair like that, about total reality, is self-perpetuating.”

— Philip K. Dick

347. “Does she make the heavens fall?” “Yes, she pulls down everything.” Molinari nodded. “It’s a psionic talent she has... it’s called being a woman.”

— Philip K. Dick

348. “It does not have wabi,” Paul said, “nor could it ever. But – ” He touched the pin with his nail. “Robert, this object has wu.”

— Philip K. Dick

349. “The fat, middle-aged landlady in her Venusian whistle-cricket hide dress and wubfur slippers repelled him; already this had become a grim experience.”

— Philip K. Dick

350. “If you or I ever really accepted the moral responsibility for what we’ve done in our lifetime – we’d drop dead or go mad. Living creatures weren’t made to understand what they do.”

— Philip K. Dick