Philip K. Dick Quotes

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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 (How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, 1978)

I'm a sick man. And the more I see, the sicker I get. I'm so sick I think everybody else is sick and I'm the only healthy person. That's bad off, isn't it?

Philip K. Dick (Solar Lottery, 1955)

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 of judgment.

Philip K. Dick (A Scanner Darkly, 1977)

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 (VALIS, 1981)

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 (How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, 1978)

I'm a strange person. Sometimes I hardly know what I'm going to do or say next. Sometimes I seem a stranger to myself. Sometimes what I do surprises me and I can't understand why I do it.

Philip K. Dick (Solar Lottery, 1955)

I guess that's the story of life: what you most fear never happens, but what you most yearn for never happens either. This is the difference between life and fiction. I suppose it's a good trade-off. But I'm not sure.

Philip K. Dick

The true measure of a man is not his intelligence or how high he rises in this freak establishment. No, the true measure of a man is this: how quickly can he respond to the needs of others and how much of himself he can give.

Philip K. Dick (Our Friends from Frolix 8, 1970)

This is a mournful discovery.
1) Those who agree with you are insane
2) Those who do not agree with you are in power.

Philip K. Dick (VALIS, 1981)

The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than the razor's edge, sharper than a hound's tooth, more agile than a mule deer. It is more elusive than the merest phantom. Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it is a phantom.

Philip K. Dick (VALIS, 1981)

Sometimes the presence of grave social problems is a stimulus to exploration; man searches relentlessly for a way out of his problems, and in doing so he presses at every door, hoping to find one that will lead him somewhere that is new and different.

Philip K. Dick (Men on the Moon, 1969)

The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things which never change... and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If you superimpose their two views, you get this result: Nothing is real.

Philip K. Dick (How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, 1978)

What they do not comprehend is man's helplessness. I am weak, small, of no consequence to the universe. It does not notice me; I live on unseen. But why is that bad? Isn't it that way? Whom the gods notice they destroy. Be small... and you will escape the jealousy of the great.

Philip K. Dick (The Man in the High Castle, 1962)

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…outside of that, I don't think they would react to anything.

Philip K. Dick (Interview, 1976)

That life had been one without excitement, with no adventure. It had been too safe. All the elements that made it up were right there before his eyes, and nothing new could ever be expected. It was like, he had once thought, a little plastic boat that would sail on forever, without incident, until it finally sank, which would be a secret relief to all.

Philip K. Dick (A Scanner Darkly, 1977)

But the actual touch of her lingered, inside his heart. That remained. In all the years of his life ahead, the long years without her, with never seeing her or hearing from her or knowing anything about her, if she was alive or happy or dead or what, that touch stayed locked within him, sealed in himself, and never went away. That one touch of her hand.

Philip K. Dick (A Scanner Darkly, 1977)

Death makes me mad. Human and animal suffering make me mad; whenever one of my cats dies I curse God and I mean it; I feel fury at him. I'd like to get him here where I could interrogate him, tell him that I think the world is screwed up, that man didn't sin and fall but was pushed - which is bad enough -- but was then sold the lie that he is basically sinful, which I know he is not.

Philip K. Dick (The Golden Man - Introduction, 1980)

For each person there is a sentence - a series of words - which has the power to destroy him ... another sentence exists, another series of words, which will heal the person. If you're lucky you will get the second; but you can be certain of getting the first: that is the way it works. On their own, without training, individuals know how to deal out the lethal sentence, but training is required to deal out the second.

Philip K. Dick (VALIS, 1981)

So we and our elaborately evolving computers may meet each other halfway. Someday a human being, named perhaps Fred White, may shoot a robot named Pete Something-or-other, which has come out of a General Electric factory, and to his surprise see it weep and bleed. And the dying robot may shoot back and, to its surprise, see a wisp of gray smoke arise from the electric pump that it supposed was Mr. White's beating heart. It would be rather a great moment of truth for both of them.

Philip K. Dick (The Shifting Realities of Phillip K. Dick, 1995)

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 (How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, 1978)

But what are you supposed to do in a society that’s corrupt? Are you supposed to obey corrupt laws? Is it a crime to break a law that’s a rotten law, or an oath that’s rotten?
“It’s a crime,” Cartwright admitted slowly. “But it may be the right thing to do.”
“In a society of criminals,” Shaeffer offered, “the innocent man goes to jail.”
“Who decides when the society is made up of criminals? Benteley demanded. “How do you know when your society has gone wrong? How do you know when it’s right to stop obeying the laws?”
“You just know,”.

Philip K. Dick (Solar Lottery, 1955)

Grief reunites you with what you've lost. It's a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that's going away. You follow it a far as you can go.
But finally,the grief goes away and you phase back into the world. Without him.
And you can accept that. What the hell choice is there? You cry, you continue to cry, because you don't ever completely come back from where you went with him -- a fragment broken off your pulsing, pumping heart is there still. A cut that never heals.
And if, when it happens to you over and over again in life, too much of your heart does finally go away, then you can't feel grief any more. And then you yourself are ready to die. You'll walk up the inclined ladder and someone else will remain behind grieving for you.

Philip K. Dick (Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, 1974)

The writer must offend people if he's going to be effective. It's like someone once said about opera. "Stab a tenor and he sings." Stab a writer -- or step on his toes -- and he'll write. It's an automatic reflex reaction. A writer writes because it's his response to the world. It's a natural process, like respiration. But above all, a writer must have a capacity for indignation. The capacity for indignation is the most important thing for a creative person. Not the aesthetic capacity but the capacity for indignation. And especially indignation at the treatment afforded other people… To see a blind and deaf baby and to feel anger, to feel fury, at the starving of children and the arrest of political dissidents. That is the basis of the writer.

Philip K. Dick (Interview with Joe Vitale, 1978)

Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. . . If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication ... and there is the real illness.

Philip K. Dick (How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, 1978)

Perhaps this is the bottom line to mental illness: incomprehensible events occur; your life becomes a bin for hoax-like fluctuations of what used to be reality. And not only that--as if that weren't enough--but you ... ponder forever over these fluctuations in an effort to order them into a coherancy, when in fact the only sense they make is the sense you impose on them, out of necessity to restore everything into shapes and processes you can recognize. The first thing to depart in mental illness is the familiar. And what takes its place is bad news because not only can you not understand it, you also cannot communicate it to other people. The madman experiences something, but what it is or where it comes from he does not know.

Philip K. Dick (VALIS, 1981)

Imagine a brain floating in a tank with millions and millions of electrodes attached to specific nerve centers. Now imagine these electrodes being selectively stimulated by a computer to cause the brain to believe that it was walking down Hollywood Boulevard chomping on a hamburger and checking out the chicks.
Now, if there was a technological foul-up, or if the tapes got jumbled, the brain would suddenly see Jesus Christ pass by down Hollywood Boulevard on his way to Golgotha, pursued by a crowd of angry people, being whipped along by seven Roman Centurions.
The brain would say, "Now hold on there!" And suddenly the entire image would go "pop" and disappear.
I've always had this funny feeling about reality. It just seems very feeble to me sometimes. It doesn't seem to have the substantiality that it's suppose to have.

Philip K. Dick (Interview with Joe Vitale, 1978)

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Philip K. Dick Biography

Born: December 16, 1928
Died: March 2, 1982

Philip K. Dick was an American novelist and writer who specialized in science fiction. He is best known for his famous science fiction works. Many of which been adapted into movies after his death.

Notable Works

The Man in the High Castle (1962)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968)
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974)
A Scanner Darkly (1977)
VALIS (1981)
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)
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