Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far more miraculous than a miracle.

The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.

As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized. The modern young man will never change his environment; for he will always change his mind.

Democracy is reproached with saying that the majority is always right. But progress says that the minority is always right.

I do not know by what extraordinary mental accident modern writers so constantly connect the idea of progress with the idea of independent thinking.