Quotes by Philip K. Dick

Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because, ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated.

Mankind needs more empathy.

An android,” he said, “doesn’t care what happens to another android. That’s one of the indications we look for.“Then,” Miss Luft said, “you must be an android.

I wonder, he wondered, if any human has ever felt this way before about an android.

If the last to know he’s an addict is the addict, then maybe the last to know when a man means what he says is the man himself, he reflected.

I used to condemn junkies, like they could get off the stuff if they really wanted to, and that is just as stupid as saying, You could grow eyes in the back of your head if you really wanted to.

#36:...Something has happened to our intelligence. My reasoning is this: arrangements of part of the Brain is a language. We are parts of the Brain; therefore, we are language. Why, then, do we not know this?

When you attack a tyranny you must expect it to fight back.

No one can win against kipple, he said, except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment Ive sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually Ill die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. Its a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.

Barefoot conducts his seminars on his houseboat in Sausalito. It costs a hundred dollars to find out why we are on this Earth. You also get a sandwich, but I wasnt hungry that day. John Lennon had just been killed and I think I know why we are on this Earth; its to find out that what you love the most will be taken away from you, probably due to an error in high places rather than by design.

I am a mask, concealing the real.

Thats the existential problem, Fat said, based on the concept that We are what we do, rather than, We are what we think. It finds its first expression in Goethes Faust, Part One, where Faust says, Im Anfang war das Wort. Hes quoting the opening of the Fourth Gospel; In the beginning was the Word. Faust says, Nein. Im Anfang war die Tat. In the beginning was the Deed. From this, all existentialism comes.

When do I see a photograph, when a reflection?

Just tell me why; why the fucking why? To which the universe would hollowly respond, My ways cannot be known, oh man. Which is to say, My ways do not make sense, nor do the ways of those who dwell in me.

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.

Were all dreaming,” Arctor said. If the last to know hes an addict is the addict, then maybe the last to know when a man means what he says is the man himself, he reflected. He wondered how much of the garbage that Donna had overheard he had seriously meant. He wondered how much of the insanity of the day--his insanity--had been real, or just induced as a contact lunacy, by the situation. Donna, always, was a pivot point of reality for him; for her this was the basic, natural question. He wished he could answer.

Blade, she thought. I swallowed it; now cuts my loins forever. Punishment. Married to a Jew and shacking up with a German assassin. She felt tears again in her eyes, boiling. For all I have committed. Wrecked. Lets go, she said, rising to her feet. The hairdresser.

Please dont continually say Im paranoid.Why?It makes me paranoid.

Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane. Or you are becoming sane, finally.

But, he thought, what does it mean, insane? A legal definition. What do I mean? I feel it, see it, but what is it?He thought, It is something they do, something they are. It is their unconsciousness. Their lack of knowledge about others. Their not being aware of what they do to others, the destruction they have caused and are causing. No, he thought. That isnt it. I dont know; I sense it, I intuit it. But -- they are purposelessly cruel... is that it? No, God, he thought. I cant find it, make it clear. Do they ignore parts of reality? Yes. But it is more. It is their plans. Yes, their plans. The conquering of the planets. Something frenzied and demented, as was their conquering of Africa, and before that, Europe and Asia.Their view; it is cosmic. Not a man here, a child there, but an abstraction : race, land. Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honourable men but of Ehre itself, hounor; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Güte, but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time.