Philip K. Dick Quotes

I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.

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.

How undisturbed, the sleep of the foolish.

He thought, too, about his need for a real animal; within him an actual hatred once more manifested itself toward his electric sheep, which he had to tend, had to care about, as if it lived. The tyranny of an object, he thought. It doesn’t know I exist. Like the androids, it had no ability to appreciate the existence of another.

Life which we can no longer distinguish; life carefully buried up to its forehead in the carcass of a dead world.

What sort of an imaginary voice is that? I asked myself, suppose Columbus had heard an imaginary voice telling him to sail west. And because of it he had discovered the New World and changed human history... We would be hard put to defend the use of the term 'imaginary' then, for that voice, since the consequences of its speaking came to affect us all. Which would have constituted greater reality, an 'imaginary' voice telling him to sail west, or a 'real' voice telling him the idea was hopeless?

The tyranny of an object, he thought. It doesn't know I exist.

I mean, knowing people, people are terrified of the unknown and they want to just kill the unknown.

No rational response was possible. Her irrationality made it so. The terrible power, he thought, of illogic.

That is the artist's job: take mineral rock from dark silent earth, transform it into shining light-reflecting form from sky.

Activity does not necessarily mean life. Quasars are active. And a monk meditating is not inanimate.

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.

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.

A Gresham’s Law: the fakes would undermine the value of the real.

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