Philip K. Dick Quotes

239 Sourced Quotes

The cries of the dead are terrible indeed; you should try not to hear them.

Philip K. Dick
In a nutshell-I fear authority but at the same time I resent it-the authority and my own fear. So I rebel.

Philip K. Dick
In the early twentieth century the problem of production had been solved; after that it was the problem of consumption that plagued society. In the 1950s and '60s, consumer commodities and farm products began to pile up in vast towering mountains all over the Western World. As much as possible was given away — but that threatened to subvert the open market. By 1980, the pro tem solution was to heap up the products and burn them: billions of dollars of worth, week after week.

Philip K. Dick
The representative of the drayage firm failed to move me.

Philip K. Dick
Insanity is not hubris, not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate — confusion between him who worships and that which is worshiped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.

Philip K. Dick
The inanity of her remark infuriated him. 'Good grief don't you understand Janet? At this point I'm thoroughly delusional. I'm as mentally ill as it's possible to be. It's incredible that I can communicate with you at all. It's a credit to my ego-strength that I'm not at this point totally autistic.

Philip K. Dick
Our methods may seem strange and indirect. Even incomprehensible. But I assure you we know what we're doing.

Philip K. Dick
To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement … Whoever defeats the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus … thereby it becomes its enemies.

Philip K. Dick
No man is infinitely strong; for every creature that runs, flies, hops or crawls there is a terminal nemesis which he will not circumvent, which will finally do him in.

Philip K. Dick
How come you didn't recognize me? Hentman said crossly. Aren't I world-famous? Or maybe you don't watch TV.

Philip K. Dick
Fat realized that one of two possibilities existed and only two; either Dr. Stone was totally insane – not just insane but totally so – or else in an artful, professional fashion he had gotten Fat to talk; he had drawn Fat out and now knew that Fat was totally insane.

Philip K. Dick
Everything is true,' he said. 'Everything anybody has ever thought.' 'Will you be all right?' 'I'll be all right,' he said, and thought, And I'm going to die. Both those are true, too.

Philip K. Dick
You know what you can buy at the supermarket? Laws inquired acidly. I'll tell you. Canned burnt offerings.
You know what you can buy at the hardware store? Hamilton answered. Scales to weigh your soul on.
That's silly, the blond said petulantly. A soul doesn't have any weight.
Then, Hamilton reflected, you could put one through the U. S. mail for nothing.
How many souls, Laws conjectured ironically, can be fitted into one stamped envelope? New religious question. Split mankind in half. Warring factions. Blood running in the gutters.
Ten, Hamilton guessed.
Fourteen, Laws contradicted.
Heretic. Baby-murdering monster.
Bestial drinker of unpurified blood.
Accursed spawn of filth-devouring evil.

Philip K. Dick
We have entered a Moment when we are alone. We cannot get assistance, as before. Well, Mr. Tagomi thought, perhaps that too is good. Or can be made good. One must still try to find the Way.

Philip K. Dick
I started reading SF when I was about twelve and I read all I could, so any author who was writing about that time, I read. But there's no doubt who got me off originally and that was A. E.
van Vogt.

Philip K. Dick
You know how people are about not taking care of an animal; they consider it immoral and antiempathic. I mean, technically it's not a crime like it was right after WWT but the feeling's still there...

Philip K. Dick
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
No structure, even an artificial one, enjoys the process of entropy. It is the ultimate fate of everything, and everything resists it.

Philip K. Dick
A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the
fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne's theorem that "No man is an island," but giving that
theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man.

Philip K. Dick
The will to believe chases out the rational mind, whenever and wherever the two come into conflict.

Philip K. Dick
Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans.

Philip K. Dick
All responsible writers, to some degree, have become involuntary criers of doom, because doom is in the wind

Philip K. Dick
The tragedy in his life already existed. To love an atmospheric spirit. That was the real sorrow. Hopelessness itself. Nowhere on the printed page, nowhere in the annals of man, would her name appear: no local habitation, no name. There are girls like that, he thought, and those you love most, the ones where there is no hope because it has eluded you at the very moment you close your hands around it.

Philip K. Dick
Death hides within every religion. And at any time it can flash forth-not with healing in its wings but with poison, with that which wounds.

Philip K. Dick
I must admit that the existence of Disneyland (which I know is real) proves that we are not living in Judaea in 50 AD.... Saint Paul would never go near Disneyland. Only children, tourists, and visiting Soviet high officials ever go to Disneyland. Saints do not.

Philip K. Dick
The day came. The wrath descended. Sin, guilt, and retribution? The manic psychoses of those entities we referred to as states, institutions, systems - the powers, the thrones, the dominations - the things which perpetually merge with men and emerge from them? Our darkness, externalized and visible? However you look upon these matters, the critical point was reached. The wrath descended.

Philip K. Dick
What scared me the most was when my father would put on the gasmask. His face would disappear... This was not a human being at all.

Philip K. Dick
God can be good and terrible-not in succession-but at the same time. This is why we seek a mediator between us and him; we approach him through the mediating priest and attenuate and enclose him through the sacraments. It is for our own safety: to trap him within confines which render him safe.

Philip K. Dick
Even if all life on our planet is destroyed, there must be other life somewhere which we know nothing of. 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. Even though I can't prove that, even though it isn't logical — I believe it.

Philip K. Dick
When I believe, I am crazy. When I don't believe,
I suffer psychotic depression.

Philip K. Dick