Philip K. Dick Quotes

Nothing could be more impolite. To say, “Is your sheep genuine?” would be a worse breach of manners.

We live in a society where detachment is almost essential.

Kevin is right about his cat. It’s all there in his dead cat. The Great Judge can’t answer Kevin: ‘Why did my cat die?’ Answer: ‘Damned if I know.’ There is no answer; there is only a dead animal that just wanted to cross the street. We’re all animals that want to cross the street only something mows us down half-way across that we never saw.

We'll know homo superior when he comes — by definition. He'll be the one we won't be able to euth.

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

36. In Summary: thoughts of the brain are experienced by us as arrangements and rearrangements – change – in a physical universe; but in fact it is really information and information-processing which we substantialize. We do not merely see its thoughts as objects, but rather as the movement, or, more precisely, the placement of objects: how they become linked to one another. But we cannot read the patterns of arrangement; we cannot extract the information in it – i.e. it as information, which is what it is. The linking and relinking of objects by the Brain is actually a language, but not a language like ours (since it is addressing itself and not someone or something outside itself). 37.

Do androids dream? Rick asked himself. Evidently; that’s why they occasionally kill their employers and flee here. A better life, without servitude. Like Luba Luft; singing Don Giovanni and Le Nozze instead of toiling across the face of a barren rock-strewn field. On a fundamentally uninhabitable colony world.

It's the basic condition of life to be required to violate our own identity.

“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,” Rita O'Neill said fiercely.

The merest presence of life, even the smallest possible quantity of volition, desire and intent was enough to reverse the process by which the eternal landscape of hell made itself known.

They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed — run over, maimed, destroyed — but they continued to play anyhow.

Because her general taste appalled him, it annoyed him that he himself constituted one of her favorites. It was an anomaly which he had never been able to take apart.

"Explain it," Hamilton muttered. "This place—this bar. Why doesn’t God erase it? If this world operates by moral laws—" "This bar is necessary to the moral order. This is a sinkpit of corruption and vice, a fleshpot of iniquity. You think salvation can function without damnation? You think virtue can exist without sin? That’s the trouble with you atheists; you don’t grasp the mechanics of evil. Get on the inside and enjoy life, man. If you’re one of the Faithful, you’ve got nothing to worry about." "Opportunist." "Bet your sweet soul."

The household was pervaded by this atmosphere of a calm adult woman and a man who gave into animal impulses. She reported to him in great detail what her analyst ... said about his binges and his hostility; she used Charley's money to pay Dr. Andrews to catalog his abnormalities. And of course Charley never heard anything directly from the doctor; he had no way of keeping her from reporting what served her and holding back what did not. The doctor, too, had no way of getting to the truth of what she told him; no doubt she only gave him the facts that suited her picture, so that the doctor's picture of Charley was based on what she wanted him to know. By the time she had edited both going and coming there was little of it outside her control.

(Hawthorne Abendsen) told us about our own world. This, what's around us now. He wants us to see it for what it is. And I do, and more so each moment.