Philip K. Dick

"These creatures are among us, although morphologically they do not differ from us; we must not posit a difference of essence, but a difference of behavior. In my science fiction I write about about them constantly. Sometimes they themselves do not know they are androids. Like Rachel Rosen, they can be pretty but somehow lack something; or, like Pris in We Can Build You, they can be absolutely born of a human womb and even design androids — the Abraham Lincoln one in that book — and themselves be without warmth; they then fall within the clinical entity "schizoid," which means lacking proper feeling. I am sure we mean the same thing here, with the emphasis on the word "thing." A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donnes theorem that "No man is an island," but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man."

"No communication." Baines was sweating. "In eighteen years there hasnt been any semantic bridge between you? Does he have any contact? Signs? Codes?" "He — ignores us. He eats here, stays with us. Sometimes he plays when we play. Or sits with us. Hes gone days on end. Weve never been able to find out what hes doing — or where. He sleeps in the barn — by himself."

"Hes too far ahead of us. We cant compete with him." Wisdoms eyes were bleak. "We can only guess whats going to happen. He knows. For him, its a sure thing. I dont think itll help him at euth, though. The whole stage is flooded simultaneously. Instantaneous gas, released throughout." He signalled impatiently to the guards. "Get going. Take him down right away. Dont waste any time."

"We were always afraid a mutant with superior intellectual powers would come along," Baines said reflectively. "A deeve who would be to us what we are to the great apes. Something with a bulging cranium, telepathic ability, a perfect semantic system, ultimate powers of symbolization and calculation. A development along our own path. A better human being." "He acts by reflex," Anita said wonderingly. She had the analysis and was sitting at one of the desks studying it intently. "Reflex — like a lion. A golden lion." She pushed the tape aside, a strange expression on her face. "The lion god." "Beast," Wisdom corrected tartly. "Blond beast, you mean." "He runs fast," Baines said, "and thats all. No tools. He doesnt build anything or utilize anything outside himself. He just stands and waits for the right opportunity and then he runs like hell." "This is worse than anything weve anticipated," Wisdom said. His beefy face was lead-gray. He sagged like an old man, his blunt hands trembling and uncertain. "To be replaced by an animal! Something that runs and hides. Something without a language!" He spat savagely. "Thats why they werent able to communicate with it. We wondered what kind of semantic system it had. It hasnt got any! No more ability to talk and think than a — dog."

"I get the picture." His voice was almost inaudible. A chilling premonition moved through him. "I was supposed to be changed like the others. But I guess something went wrong." "Something went wrong. An error occurred. And now a serious problem exists. You have seen these things. You know a great deal. And you are not coordinated with the new configuration." "Gosh," Ed muttered. "Well, I wont tell anybody." Cold sweat poured off him. "You can count on that. Im as good as changed."

"In one dim scene he saw himself lying charred and dead; he had tried to run through the line, out the exit. But that scene was vague. One wavering, indistinct still out of many. The inflexible path along which he moved would not deviate in that direction. It would not turn him that way. The golden figure in that scene, the miniature doll in that room, was only distantly related to him. It was himself, but a far-away self. A self he would never meet. He forgot it and went on to examine the other tableau. The myriad of tableaux that surrounded him were an elaborate maze, a web which he now considered bit by bit. He was looking down into a dolls house of infinite rooms, rooms without number, each with its furniture, its dolls, all rigid and unmoving."

"This time, there was no punishment from above. Sighing, Hamilton almost wished there had been; the capricious personality element infuriated him. There was just too little relationship between deed and punishment; the lightning was probably cutting down some totally innocent Cheyennite, on the far side of town."

"“But what are you supposed to do in a society that’s corrupt? Are you supposed to obey corrupt laws? Is it a crime to break a law that’s a rotten law, or an oath that’s rotten? “It’s a crime,” Cartwright admitted slowly. “But it may be the right thing to do.” “In a society of criminals,” Shaeffer offered, “the innocent man goes to jail.” “Who decides when the society is made up of criminals? Benteley demanded. “How do you know when your society has gone wrong? How do you know when it’s right to stop obeying the laws?” “You just know,” Rita ONeill said fiercely."

"We hypostasize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of the information; the message has changed. This is a language which we have lost the ability to read. We ourselves are a part of this language; changes in us are changes in the content of the information. We ourselves are information-rich; information enters us, is processed and is then projected outwards once more, now in an altered form. We are not aware that we are doing this, that in fact this is all we are doing."

"Life is short. Art, or something not life, is long, stretching out endless, like concrete worm. Flat, white, unsmoothed by any passage over or across it. Here I stand. But no longer."

"(Hawthorne Abendsen) told us about our own world. This, whats around us now. He wants us to see it for what it is. And I do, and more so each moment."

"One long-past innocent day, in my prefolly youth, I came upon a statement in an undistinguished textbook on psychiatry that, as when Kant read Hume, woke me forever from my garden-of-eden slumber. "The psychotic does not merely think he sees four blue bivalves with floppy wings wandering up the wall; he does see them. An hallucination is not, strictly speaking, manufactured in the brain; it is received by the brain, like any real sense datum, and the patient act in response to this to-him-very-real perception of reality in as logical a way as we do to our sense data. In any way to suppose he only thinks he sees it is to misunderstand totally the experience of psychosis."