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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.

Philip K. Dick

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Philip K. Dick
Age: 53 †
Born: 1928
Born: December 16
Died: 1982
Died: March 2
Essayist
Novelist
Philosopher
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Philip Kindred Dick
Philip Dick
Richard Phillips
Jack Dowland
Filip K. Dik
Explain
Scientific
Principle
Parsimony
Theory
Baroque
Principles
Employ
Simple
Disturbed
Given
Mentally
Facts
Shoot

More quotes by Philip K. Dick

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Sometimes I wish I knew how to go crazy. I forget how.
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Can anyone alter fate? All of us combined... or one great figure... or someone strategically placed, who happens to be in the right spot. Chance. Accident. And our lives, our world, hanging on it.
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The real origin of science fiction lay in the seventeeth-century novels of exploration in fabulous lands. Therefore Jules Verne's story of travel to the moon is not science fiction because they go by rocket but because of where they go. It would be as much science fiction if they went by rubber band.
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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.
Philip K. Dick
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When I was a child, I thought as a child. But now I have put away childish things. ... I must be scientific.
Philip K. Dick
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What a tragic realm this is, he reflected. Those down here are prisoners, and the ultimate tragedy is that they don't know it they think they are free because they have never been free, and do not understand what it means.
Philip K. Dick
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Fear can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy. If you’re afraid you don’t commit yourself to life completely fear makes you always, always hold something back. You shouldn’t be alone. It’s killing you it’s undermining you. All the time, every day, you should be somewhere with people.
Philip K. Dick
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Any given man sees only a tiny portion of the total truth, and very often, in fact almost ... perpetually, he deliberately deceives himself about that little precious fragment as well.
Philip K. Dick
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Basically, Sherri's idea had to do with bringing Fat's mind down from the cosmic and the abstract to the particular. She had hatched out the practical notion that nothing is more real than a large World War Two Soviet tank.
Philip K. Dick
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You know what the doctor said to me to cheer me up? Fat said. There are worse diseases than cancer. Did he show you slides? We both laughed. When you are nearly crazy with grief, you laugh at what you can.
Philip K. Dick
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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
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Life is short, he thought. Art, or something not life, is long, stretching out endless, like [a] concrete worm. Flat, white, unsmoothed by any passage over or across it.
Philip K. Dick
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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
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Maybe I'll go where I can see stars, he said to himself as the car gained velocity and altitude it headed away from San Francisco, toward the uninhabited desolation to the north. To the place where no living thing would go. Not unless it felt that the end had come.
Philip K. Dick
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The will to believe chases out the rational mind, whenever and wherever the two come into conflict.
Philip K. Dick
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It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.
Philip K. Dick
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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.
Philip K. Dick
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I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards.
Philip K. Dick
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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
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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