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.
Progress is Providence ...
Quotes from the same author
Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.
A change of opinions is almost unknown in an elderly military man.
Men reform a thing by removing the reality from it, and then do not know what to do with the unreality that is left.
The power which makes a man able to entertain a good impulse is the same as that which enables him to make a good gun; it is imagination.
The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: that there is no man really clever who has not found that he is stupid.
