Top 500 Philip K. Dick Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “Back to Germany,” one of the cops said, surveying him. “I’m an American,” Frank Frink said. “You’re a Jew,” the cop said.”

— Philip K. Dick

402. “I believe he’s got a lot of courage to write that book. If the Axis had lost the war, we’d be able to say and write anything we wanted, like we used to; we’d be one country and we’d have a fair legal system, the same one for all of us.”

— Philip K. Dick

403. “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

404. “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

405. “I’ve read the Cosmic Trigger and Robert Anton Wilson says.”

— Philip K. Dick

406. “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

407. “The man bobbed toylike in front of him, meanwhile digging into his pocket as if scratching at a familiar micro-organism that possessed parasitic proclivities that had survived the test of time.”

— Philip K. Dick

408. “Mercerism is a swindle.′ The whole experience of empathy is a swindle.”

— Philip K. Dick

409. “We human beings are created and yet we are more rational than the creator himself who spawned us.”

— Philip K. Dick

410. “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

411. “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

412. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

415. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

426. “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

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

432. “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

433. “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

434. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

436. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

439. “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

440. “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

441. “You will have to stop searching for me because l will never stop searching for you.”

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

445. “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

446. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

448. “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

449. “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

450. “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