Top 500 Philip K. Dick Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

409. “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

410. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

416. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

418. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

420. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

422. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

424. “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

425. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

428. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

430. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

432. “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

433. “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

434. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

436. “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

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

442. “Look, Haley’s comet!”

— Philip K. Dick

443. “A man is an angel that has become deranged, Joe Fernwright thought. Once they – all of them – had been genuine angels, and at that time they had had a choice between good and evil, so it was easy, easy being an angel. And then something happened. Something went wrong or broke down or failed. And they had become faced with the necessity of choosing not good or evil but the lesser of two evils, and so that had unhinged them and now each was a man.”

— Philip K. Dick

444. “But she looked – smaller. As if something in her had dwindled away, as if she had dried up. It was almost – age. Yet not quite. Could their separation have done this much damage? He doubted it. His wife, since he had seen her last, had become frail, and he did not like this; despite his animosity he felt concern.”

— Philip K. Dick

445. “The guilty, he reflected as he drove amid the heavy late-afternoon traffic as carefully as possible, may flee when no one pursues – he.”

— Philip K. Dick

446. “We cannot enter the monstrous schizophrenic morass of Nazi internecine intrigue; our minds cannot adapt.”

— Philip K. Dick

447. “God, what a dreadful thing – the truth.”

— Philip K. Dick

448. “Simple Shepherd Mortuary.”

— Philip K. Dick

449. “Going to the closet – it was the ancient-style manual variety – he hung up his coat.”

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick