How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
"We came back," Pris said, "because nobody should have to live there. It wasn't conceived for habitation, at least not within the last billion years. It's so old. You feel it in the stones, the terrible old age." (13.43)
The Earth isn't going to spin around the Sun forever, and it's going to stop supporting life a long time before then. But the sci-fi dream of space colonization looks pretty grim to Dick and his merry band of androids. The colonial planets are too old and too dead to be livable. Oh, sure, you could probably survive—for a while, at least. But maybe human life is too Earth-bound to thrive outside the atmosphere.
Quote #8
"That's not true. Even animals—even eels and gophers and snakes and spiders—are sacred." Pris, still regarding him fixedly, said, "So it can't be, can it? As you say, even animals are protected by law. All life. Everything organic that wriggles or squirms or burrows or flies or swarms or lays eggs or—" (14.63-64)
Minus the whole near-destruction of the Earth part, this future is an environmentalist's dream. All animals are sacred, and it is people's moral duty to keep them safe—even the electric ones.
Quote #9
Yet, the dark fire waned; the life force oozed out of [Rachael], as [Rick] had so often witnessed before with other androids. The classic resignation. Mechanical, intellectual acceptance of that which a genuine organism—with two billion years of the pressure to live and evolve hagriding it—could never have reconciled itself to. (17.55)
The novel often muddies up the distinction between "real" and "android" life, but here the difference is made very clear. Real people have an intense survival instinct—fight or flight, but make sure you survive. But the androids just give up and accept death. Maybe they can come up with a test for that?