Philip K. Dick - People Quotes

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I think that, like in my writing, reality is always a soap bubble, Silly Putty thing anyway. In the universe people are in, people put their hands through the walls, and it turns out they're living in another century entirely. … I often have the feeling — and it does show up in my books — that this is all just a stage.

Philip K. Dick
The wisest people are the clowns, like Harpo Marx, who would not speak. If I could have anything I want I would like God to listen to what Harpo was not saying, and understand why Harpo would not talk.

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
Helping people was one of the two basic things Fat had been told to give up; helping people and taking dope. He had stopped taking dope, but all his energy and enthusiasm were now totally channelled into saving people. Better he had kept on with the dope.

Philip K. Dick
People just have no criterion left to evaluate the importance of things. I think the only thing that would really affect people would be the announcement that the world was going to be blown up by the hydrogen bomb. I think that would really affect people. I think they would react to that. But outside of that, I don't think they would react to anything. "Peking has been wiped out by an earthquake, and the RTD — the bus strike is still on." And some guy says, "Damnit! I'll have to walk to work!"

Philip K. Dick
He could not endure what he found himself going through, and he could not get away. It seemed to him as if he sat behind the tiller of his custom-made unique quibble, facing a red light, green light, amber light all at once; no rational response was possible. Her irrationality made it so. The terrible power, he thought, of illogic. Of the archetypes. Operating out of the drear depths of the collective unconscious which joined him and her — and everyone else — together. In a knot which could never be undone, so long as they lived.
No wonder, he thought, some people, many people, long for death.

Philip K. Dick
I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. Okay, so I should revise my standards, I'm out of step. I should yield to reality. I have never yielded to reality. That's what science fiction is all about.

Philip K. Dick
People like your wife are dangerous.
Why? Hamilton asked.
They don't belong to any group. They fool around with everything. As soon as we turn our back—
So you destroy them. You turn them over to the lunatic patriots.
The lunatic patriots, McFeyffe said, we can understand. But not your wife. She signs Party peace petitions and she reads the Chicago Tribune. People like her—they're more of a menace to Party discipline than any other bunch. The cult of individualism. The idealist with his own law, his own ethics. Refusing to accept authority. It undermines society. It topples the whole structure. Nothing lasting can be built on it. People like your wife just won't take orders.

Philip K. Dick
Why? Hamilton lashed out suddenly and loudly. Why the hell did God answer that prayer? Why not some of the others? Why not Bill Laws's?
God approved of your prayer, Silky said. After all, it's up to Him; He has to decide how He feels about it.
That's terrible.
Silky shrugged. Maybe so.
How can you live with that? You never know what's going to happen—there's no order, no logic. It infuriated him that she did not object, that it seemed natural to her. We're helpless; we have to depend on whim. It keeps us from being people—we're like animals waiting to be fed. Rewarded or punished.

Philip K. Dick
Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgement. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying, but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory.

Philip K. Dick
"You of all people," the void communicated. "Out of everyone, it is you I love the most."

Philip K. Dick
This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance.

Philip K. Dick
Doctor Labyrinth, like most people who read a great deal and who have too much time on their hands, had become convinced that our civilization was going the way of Rome. He saw, I think, the same cracks forming that had sundered the ancient world, the world of Greece and Rome; and it was his conviction that presently our world, our society, would pass away as theirs did, and a period of darkness would follow.

Philip K. Dick
Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.

Philip K. Dick
People have told me that everything about me, every facet of my life, psyche, experiences, dreams, and fears, are laid out explicitly in my writing, that from the corpus of my work I can be absolutely and precisely inferred. This is true.

Philip K. Dick
But frankly—may I so speak?—your CIA people's theory strikes me as a miserable bundle of random suspicions, a few separate facts strung together by an intricate structure of ad hoc theorizing, in which everyone is credited with enormous powers for intrigue. A much simpler view can be entertained with more common sense, and as a CIA employee you must be aware that, like all intelligence agencies, it lacks the faculty of common sense.

Philip K. Dick
Ramp hawkers were peddling methods, low priced sure-fire theories guaranteed to predict bottle twitches and beat the whole Minimax game. The hawkers were ignored by the hurrying throngs of people; anybody with a genuine system of prediction would be using it, not selling it.

Philip K. Dick
When two people dream the same dream, it ceases to be an illusion.

Philip K. Dick
Certainly it constitutes bad news if the people who agree with you are buggier than batshit.

Philip K. Dick
Crazy people do not apply the principle of scientific parsimony... they shoot for the baroque.

Philip K. Dick
The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.

Philip K. Dick
We all lie to ourselves; we tell our own selves more lies than we ever do other people.

Philip K. Dick
This one fact alone, Rachmael reflected, should have frightened the rational citizen. But—
The people did not know. The media had not reported it.

Philip K. Dick
You have to be with other people, he thought. In order to live at all. I mean before they came here I could stand it... But now it has changed. You can't go back, he thought. You can't go from people to nonpeople." - J.R. Isidore

Philip K. Dick