Top 500 Philip K. Dick Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

405. “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

406. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

408. “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

409. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

412. “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

413. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

415. “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

416. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

418. “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

419. “Don’t you feel it?” he kidded her. “The historicity?”

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

421. “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

422. “If they had won, all they’d have thought about was making more money, the upper class. Abendsen, he’s wrong; there would be no social reform, no welfare public works plans – the Anglo-Saxon plutocrats wouldn’t have permitted it.” Juliana thought, Spoken like a devout Fascist.”

— Philip K. Dick

423. “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

424. “You can’t go from people to nonpeople.”

— Philip K. Dick

425. “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

426. “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

427. “Good by,’ he said and hung up. What kind of world is it, he asked himself, when an android phones up a bounty hunter and offers him assistance?”

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

430. “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

431. “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

432. “God, they read a book, he thought, and they spout on forever.”

— Philip K. Dick

433. “A dream woke me,” Arctor said. “A religious dream. In it there was this huge clap of thunder, and all of a sudden the heavens rolled aside and God appeared and His voice rumbled at me-what the hell did He say?-oh yeah. ‘I am vexed with you, my son’ He said. He was scowling. I was shaking, in the dream, and looking up, and I said, ‘What’d I do now, Lord?’ And He said, ‘You left the cap off the toothpaste tube again.’ And then I realized it was my ex-wife.”

— Philip K. Dick

434. “Nothing is true.”

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

436. “Basically, Sherri’s idea had to do with bringing Fat’s mind down from the cosmic and the abstract to the particular. She had hatched out the practical notion that nothing is more real than a large World War Two Soviet tank.”

— Philip K. Dick

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

442. “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

443. “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

444. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

447. “It meant that you were seeing into absolute reality. The essence beyond the mere appearance.” In your terminology, he thought, what you saw is called – stigmata.”

— Philip K. Dick

448. “But change’s always harsh on the loser. Nothing new.”

— Philip K. Dick

449. “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

450. “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