I never liked the idea of doing what a machine says. I hate having to salute something built in a factory.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a disdain for conforming to mechanistic or automated systems.
Philip K. Dick reflects on the tension between human creativity and the constraints imposed by machines and technology. He emphasizes a desire for individuality and authenticity, rejecting the notion of simply following orders or adhering to artificial constructs that lack the richness of human experience and decision-making.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of creativity in the workplace.
We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in reality occurs. We have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the present - deja vu.
Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.
On some other world, possibly it is different. Better. There are clear good and evil alternatives. Not these obscure admixtures, these blends, with no proper tool by which to untangle the components.
"Do you have information that there's an android in the cast? I'd be glad to help you, and if I were an android would I be glad to help you?" "An android," he said, "doesn't care what happens to another android. That's one of the indications we look for." "Then," Miss Luft said, "you must be an android."
The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three dimensional and not in space or time.
A man is an angel that has gone deranged.
As long as habit and routine dictate the pattern of living, new dimensions of the soul will not emerge.
A law is something which must have a moral basis, so that there is an inner compelling force for every citizen to obey.
Honesty is such a lonely word. Everyone is so untrue.
Find a printer paper and imagine a full-grown bird shaped something like a football with legs standing on it. Imagine 33,000 of these rectangles in a grid. (Broilers are never in cages, and never on multiple levels.) Now enclose the grid with windowless walls and put a ceiling on top. Run in automated (drug-laced) feed, water, heating, and ventilation systems. This is a farm.
If God had made a perfect world, it would be a magic trick, not creation, with no meaning or place for us to learn and create. Mankind is not yet ready for a perfect world. We do not know how to appreciate perfection.
The dream remains overloaded with the badly lived passions of daytime life. Solitude in the nocturnal dream is always a hostility. It is strange. It isn't really our solitude.
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