Top 500 Philip K. Dick Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “Activity does not necessarily mean life.”

— Philip K. Dick

302. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

311. “Watching him, Juliana thought, It’s idealism that makes him that bitter. Asking too much out of life. Always moving on, restless and griped.”

— Philip K. Dick

312. “Blade, she thought. I swallowed it; now cuts my loins forever. Punishment. Married to a Jew and shacking up with a German assassin. She felt tears again in her eyes, boiling. For all I have committed. Wrecked. ‘Let’s go,’ she said, rising to her feet. ‘The hairdresser.”

— Philip K. Dick

313. “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

314. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

316. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

321. “He fixed things – clocks, refrigerators, vidsenders and destinies.”

— Philip K. Dick

322. “One invisible puff-puff whisk of economically priced Ubik banishes compulsive obsessive fears that the entire world is turning into clotted milk, worn-out tape recorders and obsolete iron-cage elevators, plus other, further, as-yet-unglimpsed manifestations of decay.”

— Philip K. Dick

323. “Human has always striven to retain the past, to keep it convincing; there’s nothing wicked in that. Without it we have no continuity; we have only the moment. And, deprived of the past, the moment – the present – has little meaning, if any.”

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

325. “Secretaries, he thought acidly, read that junk, at home alone in bed at night. It stimulates them. Instead of the real thing. Which they’re afraid of. But of course really crave.”

— Philip K. Dick

326. “Sometimes I think this planet is under a spell,” Elias said. “We are asleep or in a trance, and something causes us to see what it wants us to see and remember and think what it wants us to remember and think. Which means we’re whatever it wants us to be. Which in turn means that we have no genuine existence. We’re at the mercy of some kind of whim.”

— Philip K. Dick

327. “With him inside the elevator descended.”

— Philip K. Dick

328. “There is no door to God through dope; that is a lie peddled by the unscrupulous.”

— Philip K. Dick

329. “Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything.”

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

331. “Spray a bug with a toxin and it dies; spray a man, spray his brain, and he becomes an insect that clacks and vibrates about in a closed circle forever. A reflex machine, like an ant. Repeating his last instruction.”

— Philip K. Dick

332. “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

333. “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

334. “It would have been rewarding to talk to Dave, he decided. Dave would have approved what I did. But also he would have understood the other part, which I don’t think even Mercer comprehends. For Mercer everything is easy, he thought, because Mercer accepts everything. Nothing is alien to him. But what I’ve done, he thought; that’s become alien to me. In fact everything about me has become unnatural; I’ve become an unnatural self.”

— Philip K. Dick

335. “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

336. “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

337. “The will to believe chases out the rational mind, whenever and wherever the two come into conflict.”

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

339. “One seeks to contravene one’s perceptions – why? So that one can wander utterly lost, without signposts or guide?”

— Philip K. Dick

340. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

342. “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

343. “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

344. “You will manually feel this object with your left hand,” he said to himself, “and at the same time you will look at it with your right. And then in your own words you will tell us – ” He could not think out any more nonsense. Not without their help.”

— Philip K. Dick

345. “I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”

— Philip K. Dick

346. “It’s impossible that James Joyce could have mentioned “talk-tapes” in his writing, Asher thought. Someday I’m going to get my article published; I’m going to prove that Finnegan’s Wake is an information pool based on computer memory systems that didn’t exist until a century after James Joyce’s era; that Joyce was plugged into a cosmic consciousness from which he derived the inspiration for his entire corpus of work. I’ll be famous forever.”

— Philip K. Dick

347. “Somebody took my actual physical presence away and substituted this.”

— Philip K. Dick

348. “Thomas,” Fat told me, “is smarter than I am, and he knows more than I do. Of the two of us Thomas is the master personality.” He considered that good; woe unto someone who has an evil or stupid other personality in his head!”

— Philip K. Dick

349. “After her initial fear had diminished, something else had begun to emerge from her. Something more strange. And, he thought, deplorable. A coldness. Like, he thought, a breath from the vacuum between inhabited worlds, in fact from nowhere: it was not what she did or said but what she did not do and say. “Some other time,” the girl said, and moved back toward her apartment door.”

— Philip K. Dick

350. “In other words, an entire new world is pointed to, by this. The name for it is neither art, for it has no form, nor religion. What is it? I have pondered this pin unceasingly, yet cannot fathom it. We evidently lack the work for an object like this. So you are right, Robert. It is authentically a new thing on the face of the world.”

— Philip K. Dick