10 Philip Kindred Dick Quotes on Power

Philip Kindred Dick quotes on power

15. Whom the gods notice they destroy. Be small...and you will escape the jealousy of the great.

17. 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.

21. Are we to assist it in gaining power in order to save our lives? Is that the paradox of our earthly situation?

43. 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 misfirings- then the victim, whether a person or a party or a country, can never marshal itself to defend itself.

49. 'Mountains, Bruce, mountains,' the manager said. 'Mountains, Bruce, mountains,' Bruce said and gazed. 'Echolalia, Bruce, echolalia,' the manager said. 'Echolalia, Bruce-' 'Okay, Bruce,' the manager said, and shut the cabin door behind him, thinking, I believe I'll put him among the carrots. Or beets. Something simple. Something that won't puzzle him.

50. 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.

51. 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 the words.

59. To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement ... Whoever defeats the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus ... thereby it becomes its enemies.

60. The Empire Never Ended

64. It was evident to Elias Tate that this was the government. First they shake hands with you, he thought, and then they murder you.