Philip K. Dick
I'd like to see you move up to the goat class, where I think you belong.Collection: Moving
In this dark world where he now dwelt, ugly things and surprising things and once in a long while a tiny wondrous thing spilled out at him constantly; he could count on nothing.Collection: Dark
Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything.Collection: Sorry
In Washington and Moscow they are saying, 'Man has finally come of age; he doesn't need paternalistic help.' Which is another way of saying, 'We have abolished that help, and in its place we will rule,' offering no help at all: taking but not giving, ruling but not obeying, telling but not listening, taking life and not giving it. The slayers govern now, without interference; the dreams of mankind have become empty.Collection: Dream
In one of the most brilliant papers in the English language Hume made it clear that what we speak of as 'causality' is nothing more than the phenomenon of repetition. When we mix sulphur with saltpeter and charcoal we always get gunpowder. This is true of every event subsumed by a causal law in other words, everything which can be called scientific knowledge. "It is custom which rules ," Hume said, and in that one sentence undermined both science and philosophy .Collection: Philosophy
Men and the world are mutually toxic to each other.Collection: Men
The silence of the world could not rein back it's greed. Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won.Collection: Silence
I mean, knowing people, people are terrified of the unknown and they want to just kill the unknown.Collection: Mean
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. IsidoreCollection: Mean
You must beware of seeing malice behind accidental injury.Collection: Injury
But an artist, he realized. Or rather so-called artist. Bohemian. That's closer to it. The artistic life without the talent.Collection: Artist
The tragedy in his life already existed. To love an atmospheric spirit. That was the real sorrow. Hopelessness itself. Nowhere on the printed page, nowhere in the annals of man, would her name appear: no local habitation, no name. There are girls like that, he thought, and those you love most, the ones where there is no hope because it has eluded you at the very moment you close your hands around it.Collection: Love
Life ... is only heavy and none else; there is only the one trip, all heavy. Heavy that leads to the grave. For everyone and everything.Collection: Life
It's easy to win. Anybody can win.Collection: Sunset
Amazed, Fat said, "She's decomposing and yet she's still giving birth?" "Only to monsters," Dr. Stone said.Collection: Giving
Little kids are that way; they feel if their parents aren't watching what they do then what they do isn't real.Collection: Real
Are we to assist it in gaining power in order to save our lives? Is that the paradox of our earthly situation?Collection: Order
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.Collection: Men
We do not have an ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious.Collection: Effort
A child of today can detect a lie quicker than the wisest adult of two decades ago. When I want to know what is true, I ask my children.Collection: Children
Those who refused to respond to the new stimulus would perish. Adapt or perish.Collection: Statistics
God is dead,' Nick said. 'They found his carcass in 2019. Floating in space near Alpha.' 'They found the remains of an organism advanced several thousand times over what we are,' Charley said. 'And evidently could create habitable worlds and populate them with living organisms, derived from itself. But that doesn't prove it was God.Collection: Space
It is amazing that when someone else spouts the nonsense you yourself believe you can readily perceive it as nonsenseCollection: Believe
THE ONLY REAL FAILURE IS TO FAIL OTHERS.Collection: Real
In a sense, the better you adapt to school the less your chances are of later adapting to the actual world. So I figure, the worse you adapt to school, the better you will be able to handle reality when you finally manage to get loose at last from school, if that ever happens. But I guess I have what in the military they call a 'poor attitude,' which means 'shape up or ship out.' I always elected to ship out.Collection: Attitude
I like her; I could watch her the rest of my life. She has breasts that smile.Collection: Watches
Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find.Collection: Terrible
The mentally disturbed do not employ the Principle of Scientific Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of facts. They shoot for the baroque.Collection: Simple
Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying.Collection: Dying
There is evil! It's actual, like cement. I can't believe it. I can't stand it. Evil is not a view ... it's an ingredient in us. In the world. Poured over us, filtering into our bodies, minds, hearts, into the pavement itself.Collection: Believe
Where there's dope, there's hope!Collection: Dope
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.Collection: Heart
The painting showed a hairless, oppressed creature with a head like an inverted pear, its hands clapped in horror to its ears, its mouth open in a vast, soundless scream. Twisted ripples of the creature's torment, echoes of its cry, flooded out into the air surrounding it; the man or woman, whichever it was, had become contained by its own howl. It had covered its ears against its own sound. The creature stood on a bridge and no one else was present; the creature screamed in isolation. Cut off by - or despite - its outcry.Collection: Cutting
When I was a child, I thought as a child. But now I have put away childish things. ... I must be scientific.Collection: Children
A lot can be said for the infinite mercies of God, but the smarts of a good pharmacist, when you get down to it, is worth more.Collection: Smart
We are in a maze which we built, and then we fell into, now can't get out. To make the game into something real, something more than merely an intellectual exercise, we elected to lose our exceptional faculties, to reduce us an entire level. This unfortunately, includes a loss of memory.Collection: Memories
No man is infinitely strong; for every creature that runs, flies, hops or crawls there is a terminal nemesis which he will not circumvent, which will finally do him in.Collection: Strength
How can days and happenings and moments so good become so quickly ugly, and for no reason, for no real reason? Just - change. With nothing causing it.Collection: Real
The will to believe chases out the rational mind, whenever and wherever the two come into conflict.Collection: Believe
I think great art should play a part in the ordinary man's life, don't you? It can make his existence so much richer and more meaningful.Collection: Meaningful
The person I am now, compared with the person in the dream, has been baffled and defeated and only supposes he enjoys a full life. In the dreams, I see what a full life really consists of, and it is not what I really have.Collection: Dream
He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.Collection: Life
He started keeping a journal - had been, in fact, secretly doing so for some time: the furtive act of a deranged person.Collection: Facts
Can we consider the universe real, and if so, in what way?Collection: Real
(Insanity) is not hubris, not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate - confusion between him who worships and that which is worshipped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.Collection: Pride
What constitutes the authentic human being?Collection: Humans
God can be good and terrible-not in succession-but at the same time. This is why we seek a mediator between us and him; we approach him through the mediating priest and attenuate and enclose him through the sacraments. It is for our own safety: to trap him within confines which render him safe.Collection: Safety
Dilemma of civilized man; body mobilized, but danger obscure.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Dream