About five years ago, browsing around a bookshop, I stumbled across Aldous Huxley’s Ape and Essence. Of course, I was familiar with Huxley and a bunch of his works, such as Brave New World, The Doors of Perception, and Music at Night. But I had never heard of Ape and Essence before. So, I picked it up, read its synopsis, and a few random sentences from random pages. “This smells like a delicious dystopian novel,” I whispered to myself. And, to no one’s surprise, I ended up buying it. And I enjoyed reading it very, very much. (So, if you’re into dystopian literature like I am, make sure you read this one, too.)

Here are five quotes from Aldous Huxley’s Ape and Essence:

In the field of politics the equivalent of a theorem is a perfectly disciplined army; of a sonnet or picture, a police state under a dictatorship.

– Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence

But I was thinking that the dream of Order begets tyranny, the dream of Beauty, monsters and violence.

– Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence

Yes, my friends, remember how indignant you once felt when the Turks massacred more than the ordinary quota of Armenians, how you thanked God that you lived in a Protestant, progressive country, where such things simply couldn’t happen — couldn’t happen because men wore bowler hats and travelled daily to town by the eight-twenty-three.

– Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence

They have to be punished for having been punished.

– Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence

And whenever evil is carried to the limit, it always destroys itself.

– Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence