"We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world."
— Terence McKenna

"Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation."
— Terence McKenna (Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution)

"It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane."
— Philip K. Dick

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. "
— Philip K. Dick

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them."
— Philip K. Dick

"If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others."
— Philip K. Dick

"Certainly it constitutes bad news when the people who agree with you are buggier than batshit."
— Philip K. Dick

"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

"Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups...So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing."
— Philip K. Dick

"How'd you like to gaze at a beer can throughout eternity? It might not be so bad. There'd be nothing to fear."
— Philip K. Dick (A Scanner Darkly)

"There will come a time when it isn't 'They're spying on me through my phone' anymore. Eventually, it will be 'My phone is spying on me.'"
— Philip K. Dick

"The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things which never change... and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If you superimpose their two views, you get this result: Nothing is real."
— Philip K. Dick

"The cries of the dead are terrible indeed; you should try not to hear them."
— Philip K. Dick (VALIS)

"There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive. "
— Philip K. Dick (VALIS)

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
"
— Philip K. Dick

"I became educated to the fact that the greatest pain does not come zooming down from a distant planet, but from the depths of the heart. Of course, both could happen; your wife and child could leave you, and you could be sitting alone in your empty house with nothing to live for, and in addition the Martians could bore through the roof and get you."
— Philip K. Dick

"I did not tell Fat this, but technically he had become a Buddha. It did not seem to me like a good idea to let him know. After all, if you are a Buddha you should be able to figure it out for yourself."
— Philip K. Dick (VALIS)

"Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find."
— Philip K. Dick (The Man in the High Castle)

"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."
— Philip K. Dick

"I guess that's the story of life: what you most fear never happens, but what you most yearn for never happens either. This is the difference between life and fiction. I suppose it's a good trade-off. But I'm not sure."
— Philip K. Dick

"Well, I hate to admit it, but it is possible that there is (one) such a thing as telepathy and (two) that the CETI project's idea that we might communicate with extraterrestrial beings via telepathy is possibly a reasonable idea--if telepathy exists and if ETIs exist. Otherwise we are trying to communicate with someone who doesn't exist with a system which doesn't work."
— Philip K. Dick (The Dark-Haired Girl)

"I'd like to see you move up to the goat class, where I think you belong."
— Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)

"Everything in life is just for a while"
— Philip K. Dick (A Scanner Darkly)

""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.""
— Philip K. Dick (Our Friends from Frolix 8)

"In a one-party system there is always a landslide."
— Philip K. Dick (Radio Free Albemuth)

"Fat realized that one of two possibilities existed and only two; either Dr. Stone was totally insane – not just insane but totally so – or else in an artful, professional fashion he had gotten Fat to talk; he had drawn Fat out and now knew that Fat was totally insane."
— Philip K. Dick (VALIS)

"I mean, knowing people, people are terrified of the unknown and they want to just kill the unknown. "
— Philip K. Dick (What If Our World Is Their Heaven?)

"All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
— George Orwell

"He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past."
— George Orwell (1984)

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
— Aldous Huxley

"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music."
— Aldous Huxley

"Maybe this world is another planet’s hell."
— Aldous Huxley

"One of the most effective forms of industrial or military sabotage limits itself to damage that can never be thoroughly proven - or even proven at all - to be anything deliberate. It is like an invisible political movement; perhaps it isn't there at all. If a bomb is wired to a car's ignition, then obviously there is an enemy; if public building or a political headquarters is blown up, then there is a political enemy. But if an accident, or a series of accidents, occurs, if equipment merely fails to function, if it appears faulty, especially in a slow fashion, over a period of natural time, with numerous small failures and misfiring- then the victim, whether a person or a party or a country, can never marshal itself to defend itself."
— Philip K. Dick (A Scanner Darkly)

"Human has always striven to retain the past, to keep it convincing; there's nothing wicked in that. Without it we have no continuity; we have only the moment. And, deprived of the past, the moment - the present - has little meaning, if any."
— Philip K. Dick (Now Wait for Last Year)

"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 (VALIS)

"There are no private lives. This a most important aspect of modern life. One of the biggest transformations we have seen in our society is the diminution of the sphere of the private. We must reasonably now all regard the fact that there are no secrets and nothing is private. Everything is public."
— Philip K. Dick

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Mother Night)

"And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

"Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"
— Kurt Vonnegut

"We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"And so it goes..."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different."
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

"Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

"Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five)

"Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Dance Like No One is Watching...
Love Like You Have Never Been Hurt Before...
Go to Work Like You Don't Need The Money."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest."
— Kurt Vonnegut