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

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. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

412. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

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. “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

425. “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

426. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

428. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

432. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

434. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

436. “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

437. “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

438. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

441. “Fat had phoned his pharmacy somewhere along the line to get a refill on his Librium prescription; he had taken thirty Librium just before taking the digitalis. The pharmacist had contacted the paramedics. A lot can be said for the infinite mercies of God, but the smarts of a good pharmacist, when you get down to it, is worth more.”

— Philip K. Dick

442. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

444. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

448. “The universe makes certain decisions and on the basis of these decisions some people live and some people die. This is a harsh law. But every creature yields to it out of necessity.”

— Philip K. Dick

449. “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

450. “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