Philip K. Dick Quotes

This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.

The worst derangement of the spirit is to believe things because we want them to be so, not because we have seen them for what they are.

We believe we're seeing the world just fine until it's called to our attention that we're not.

Intelligent people make many mistakes because they cannot believe the world is really as foolish as it is.

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

I'm used to people with very high IQs knowing how to recognize reality, but there's a huge human tendency where it may be instructive to think that whatever you're doing to succeed is all right.

My point is that perceptual bias can affect nut jobs and scientists alike. If we hold too rigidly to what we think we know, we ignore or avoid evidence of anything that might change our mind.

I don't question things that go against what I believe very much. But boy, the stuff that I really want to believe, I really question a lot.

Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.

You can convince yourself of just about anything when you want to believe a conspiracy theory.

Don't fall into the trap of believing so deeply in your own ideology that you cannot even see the flaws in it.

If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do.

People readily believe what they want to believe.

We are often confident even when we are wrong, and an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are.

The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

I think that there is something that happens, a phenomenon that happens around a conspiracy theory, where if you believe in a conspiracy theory, then every critique of that theory is simply more proof that the conspiracy exists. And I think that that's something that goes on in the person of Donald Trump.

The things that we want we willingly believe, and the things that we think we expect everyone else to think.

I regard belief as a form of brain damage.

It's sometimes easier to reject strong evidence than to admit that we've been wrong, this is information about ourselves worth having.

It is in the ability to deceive oneself that the greatest talent is shown.

How baffling it was that even the most cunning and clever people would frequently see only what they wanted to see, and would rarely look beyond the thinnest of facades. Or they would ignore reality, dismissing it as the facade. And then, when their whole world fell to pieces...they would tear their topknots or rend their clothes and bewail their karma, blaming gods or kami or luck or their lords or husbands or vassals-anything or anyone-but never themselves.

The paradigm helps a person identify the thought system, which is almost always false, that is behind the rationale for the continuation of excuses. It helps them really look at excuses from an objective point of view and realize that everything they've been thinking is just as likely to be not true as it is to be true.

In my experience, you always think you know what you're doing; you always think you can explain, but you always discover, years later, that you didn't and you couldn't. This leads me to suspect that the principal function of human reason is to rationalize what your lizard brain demands of you. That's my idea.

You don't want to know the Truth, you want to know the truth as you understand it. This is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment. You think you already know the truth! You think you already understand how it is. So you agree with everything you see or hear or read that falls into the paradigm of your understanding, and reject everything which does not.

The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.