Top 500 Philip K. Dick Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

403. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

406. “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

407. “But the longing within him had grown even greater, the overpowering need to be alone. Locked in an empty room, entirely unwitnessed, silent and supine. Stretched out, not needing to speak, not needing to move. Not required to cope with anyone or any problem. And no one will even know where I am, he told himself. That seemed, unaccountably, very important; he wanted to be unknown and invisible, to live unseen.”

— Philip K. Dick

408. “In a foolish and loud manner he had argued politics; he had been rude in his disagreeing, and only the adroit tact of his host had sufficed to save the evening. How much I have to learn, Childan thought. They’re so graceful and polite. And I – the white barbarian. It is true.”

— Philip K. Dick

409. “I didn’t choose to get entangled in my domestic life, my boxer’s clinch with Kathy. And if you think I did or do, it’s because you’re morbidly young. You’ve failed to pass from adolescent freedom into the land which I inhabit: married to a woman who is economically, intellectually, and even this, too, even erotically my superior.”

— Philip K. Dick

410. “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

411. “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

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. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— 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. “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

419. “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

420. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

422. “But at least he can still see the lights below us. Although maybe for him it doesn’t matter.”

— Philip K. Dick

423. “It was the mob that swept him into office. However, it’s unlikely that when more sober elements prevail they’ll want to support a cripple and demagogue who depends on inflaming the mass with his lies and spellbinding.”

— Philip K. Dick

424. “It is impossible that ours is the only world; there must be world after world unseen by us, in some region or dimension that we simply do not perceive.”

— Philip K. Dick

425. “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

426. “Guilt is useless. The world torments us, and we react by tormenting ourselves. I wonder how we can ever have such a low opinion of ourselves that we join in.”

— Philip K. Dick

427. “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

428. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

431. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

434. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

436. “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

437. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

442. “Entering the phone booth, he did a phone thing.”

— Philip K. Dick

443. “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

444. “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

445. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

447. “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

448. “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

449. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick