Top 500 Philip K. Dick Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Nothing is so alien, so bleak and unfriendly, as the strip of gas stations – cut-rate gas stations – and motels on the rim of your own city. You fail to recognize it. And at the same time, you have to clasp it to your bosom. Not just for one night, but as long as you intend to live where you live.”

— Philip K. Dick

402. “Of course, the way they put it, the idea was if we had to buy our gas masks and bomb shelters we’d take better care of them. As if we ever damaged telephones and sidewalks. Or highways, because the whole state provided them. Or armies.”

— Philip K. Dick

403. “What action would not be futile, when a man could look upon his own aged, yellowed skull? Better they should enjoy their temporary lives, while they still had them to enjoy.”

— Philip K. Dick

404. “What you should do,” she told Fat during one of his darker hours, “is get into studying the characteristics of the T-34.” Fat asked what that was. It turned out that Sherri had read a book on Russion armor during World War Two. The T-34 tank had been the Soviet Union’s salvation and thereby the salvation of all the Allied Powers- and, by extension, Horselover Fat’s, since without the T-34 he would be speaking – not english or Latin or the koine – but German.”

— Philip K. Dick

405. “I’m sorry,” Leon said. “I can see you loved your two friends and you miss them, and maybe they’re flying around somewhere in the sky, zipping here and there and being spirits and happy. But you and I and three billion other people are not, and until it changes here it won’t be enough, Phil; not enough. Despite the supreme heavenly father. He has to do something for us here, and that’s the truth. If you believe in the truth – well, Phil, that’s the truth. The harsh, unpleasant truth.”

— Philip K. Dick

406. “He himself did not blame the president – it wasn’t the president’s fault that the Chinese had decided to honor their pact.”

— Philip K. Dick

407. “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

408. “He awoke – and wanted Mars. The valleys, he thought. What would it be like to trudge among them? Great and greater yet: the dream grew as he became fully conscious, the dream and the yearning. He could almost feel the enveloping presence of the other world, which only Government agents and high officials had seen. A clerk like himself? Not likely. “Are.”

— Philip K. Dick

409. “Don’t never participate in no bad scenes, he reminded himself; that was his motto in life.”

— Philip K. Dick

410. “The ignorance of the dark-skinned strata, despite the government’s ceaseless educational campaigns. No wonder their women were often preg.”

— Philip K. Dick

411. “A child of today can detect a lie quicker than the wisest adult of two decades ago. When I want to know what is true, I ask my children.”

— Philip K. Dick

412. “Oracle, why did you write The Grasshopper Lies Heavy? What are we supposed to learn?”

— Philip K. Dick

413. “Sometimes one must try anything, it is no disgrace. On the contrary, it is a sign of wisdom.”

— Philip K. Dick

414. “Odd that the brain could function on its own, without acquainting him with its purposes, its reasons. But the brain was an organ, like the spleen, heart, kidneys. And they went about their private activities. So why not the brain?”

— Philip K. Dick

415. “You got me out of this place and here’s your reward; you’re everything we jointly abominate. The essence of what we’re committed to destroy.”

— Philip K. Dick

416. “You’re a function of an impersonal cultural totality. You have no standards of your own. In the twentieth century men had personal standards of workmanship, artistic craft, pride of accomplishment, these words mean nothing to you. You have no soul.”

— Philip K. Dick

417. “Because when the death-dealing powers of ice and cold reach your loins, your breasts and hips and buttocks as well as your heart – it was already deep in her heart, surely – then there will be no more woman. And you won’t survive that. No matter what I or any man chooses to do.”

— Philip K. Dick

418. “Madness has its own dynamism. It just goes on.”

— Philip K. Dick

419. “I hope I never get in a fix like that,” Taubman said. “Hating someone I once loved.”

— Philip K. Dick

420. “They’re not idealists like Joe and me; they’re cynics with utter faith. It’s a sort of brain defect, like a lobotomy – that.”

— Philip K. Dick

421. “It looks,” Lotze said, gazing down, “as if it was designed by a Jew.”

— Philip K. Dick

422. “The little man with beard and glasses leaped up. ‘There’s nobody here has anything to do with governments! We’re all good people!”

— Philip K. Dick

423. “That’s really an exceedingly sophisticated idea, epistemologically speaking. Does it mean that parts of the world are spurious? Or that sometimes the whole world is spurious? Or that there are plural worlds of which one is real and the others are not? Is there essentially one matrix world from which people derive differing perceptions? So that the world you see is not the world I see?”

— Philip K. Dick

424. “It takes a certain amount of courage, he though, to face yourself and say with candor, I’m rotten. I’ve done evil and I will again. It was no accident; it emanated from the true, authentic me.”

— Philip K. Dick

425. “She sighed. “Oh, God, to be in the flyship cruising through the void. That’s what I long for: an infinite void. With no human voices, no human smells, no human jaws masticating plastic chewing gum in nine iridescent colors.”

— Philip K. Dick

426. “Of course, he snuck all this in under the guise of pulp science fiction, baiting us into believing that maybe this is all just fantasy. Only once the story is over, and we take another look at the world around us, do we realize: It’s all completely true.”

— Philip K. Dick

427. “Yes, these new young people, of the rising generation, who did not remember the days before the war or even the war itself – they were the hope of the world.”

— Philip K. Dick

428. “I’ll try a slice of peach,” she said, and gingerly picked out a slippery pink-orange furry slice with her long fingers. And then, as she ate the slice of peach, she began to cry.”

— Philip K. Dick

429. “But in the end I decided against it. The hell with the newspapers. Nobody reads the letters to the editor column except more nuts. The whole world is full of nuts. It’s enough to get you down.”

— Philip K. Dick

430. “But an artist, he realized. Or rather so-called artist. Bohemian. That’s closer to it. The artistic life without the talent.”

— Philip K. Dick

431. “When you attack a tyranny you must expect it to fight back.”

— Philip K. Dick

432. “Most self-indulgent of all Nazis, and is in sharp contrast to late H. Himmler, who lived in personal want at low salary. Herr Goring representative of spoils mentality, using power as means of acquiring personal wealth. Primitive mentality, even vulgar, but quite intelligent man, possibly most intelligent of all Nazi chiefs. Object of his drives: self-glorification in ancient emperor fashion.”

— Philip K. Dick

433. “And what good was a political strategist who couldn’t look ahead to his own death? Without that he would have been merely another Hitler, who didn’t want his country to survive him.”

— Philip K. Dick

434. “We should take mothers in high seas and drown them there, they are as poisonous as lead in the air.”

— Philip K. Dick

435. “This guy – Joe whatever – hasn’t even got the right expression on his face; he should have that cold but somehow enthusiastic look, as if he believed in nothing and yet somehow had absolute faith.”

— Philip K. Dick

436. “One constant has prevailed, though, throughout all theories. There must indeed be a mysterious Holy Spirit which has an exact and intimate relation to Christ, which can indwell in human minds, guide and inform them, and even express itself through those humans, even without their awareness.”

— Philip K. Dick

437. “They ought to make it a binding clause that if you find God you get to keep Him.”

— Philip K. Dick

438. “Always this barrier, this impossibility of getting through. This time he did not waste his time trying; he simply went on stroking her, thinking, It’ll be on my conscience, whatever happens to her. And she knows it, too. So she’s absolved of the burden of responsibility, and that, for her, is the worst thing possible. Too bad, he thought, I wasn’t able to make love to her.”

— Philip K. Dick

439. “All responsible writers, to some degree, have become involuntary criers of doom, because doom is in the wind.”

— Philip K. Dick

440. “We talked for a while about the area, and then I told Nat about a paper I had written in college about the Roman general Stilicho.”

— Philip K. Dick

441. “Human beings had invented war, invented and manufactured the weapons, even invented the players, the fighters, the actors of the war. But they themselves could not venture forth, could not wage it themselves.”

— Philip K. Dick

442. “They know a million tricks, those novelists.”

— Philip K. Dick

443. “Religion, Sebastian thought wearily. More ins and outs, more angles, than ordinary commerce.”

— Philip K. Dick

444. “How long that part of the cycle had lasted he did not now know; nothing had happened, generally, so it had been measureless.”

— Philip K. Dick

445. “I chose God over the material universe.”

— Philip K. Dick

446. “It was on the order of coin or stamp collecting; no rational explanation could ever be given. And high prices were being paid by wealthy collectors.”

— Philip K. Dick

447. “Without war the lower elements of mankind have increased all out of proportion. They threaten the educated few, those with scientific knowledge and training, the ones equipped to direct society. They have no regard for science or a scientific society, based on reason. And this Movement seeks to aid and abet them. Only when scientists are in full control can the –.”

— Philip K. Dick

448. “I had a lot of fears that the universe would discover just how different I was from it.”

— Philip K. Dick

449. “Typical of their mania for the trivial, their legalistic fascination with documents, proclamations, ads.”

— Philip K. Dick

450. “Caroline said, “She’s terribly, terribly disruptive.” “So is reality,” Hawthorne said.”

— Philip K. Dick