Top 500 Philip K. Dick Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

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. “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

306. “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

307. “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

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. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

315. “Activity does not necessarily mean life.”

— Philip K. Dick

316. “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

317. “With him inside the elevator descended.”

— Philip K. Dick

318. “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

319. “Maybe – after 14 months all I really know is that I don’t know anything except that it happened to me, and what I saw during that short time was real. That’s.”

— Philip K. Dick

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

329. “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

330. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

337. “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

338. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

341. “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

342. “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

343. “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

344. “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

345. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

348. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

350. “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