Progress & Progressives

Science’s greatest triumph appears to lie in the increasing speed with which an idiot can transport his idiocy from one place to another.

The intelligent leftist admits that his generation will not construct the perfect society, but trusts in a future generation.
His intelligence discovers his personal impotence, but his leftism prevents him from discovering man’s impotence.

Tolerance consists of a firm decision to allow them to insult everything we seek to love and respect, as long as they do not threaten our material comforts.
Modern, liberal, democratic, progressive man, as long as they do not step on his calluses, will let them degrade his soul. 
 
The left never attributes its failure to a mistaken diagnosis but to the perversity of events.

Social problems are the favorite refuge of those fleeing their own problems.
Progress in the end comes down to stealing from man what ennobles him, in order to sell to him at a cheap price what degrades him.

Denigrating progress is too easy. I aspire to the professorship in methodical regression.

Progress is the scourge God has chosen for us.

The failure of progress has not consisted in the non-fulfillment but in the fulfillment of its promises.

The horror of progress can only be measured by someone who has known a landscape before and after progress has transformed it.
For the fool, obsolete opinion and erroneous opinion are synonymous expressions.

In the end, what does modern man call “Progress”?
Whatever seems convenient to the fool.

A progressive defends Progress by saying that it exists.
The murderer also exists, and the judge condemns him.

A greater capacity for killing is the criterion of “progress” between two peoples or two epochs.

Resistance is futile when everything in the world is conspiring to destroy what we admire.
We are always left, however, with an incorruptible soul, so that we might contemplate, judge, and disdain.

An “ideal society” would be the graveyard of human greatness.

"Renouncing the world" ceases to be an achievement and becomes a temptation as Progress progresses.
It is indecent, and even obscene, to speak to man of “progress,” when every path winds its way up between funerary cypresses.

The only possible progress is the internal progress of each individual.
A process that concludes with the end of each life.

We can only hope for a reform of society to come from the contradictions between human follies.

In order to avoid a manly confrontation with nothingness, man erects altars to progress.

What is called progress are preparations for a catastrophe.

The left’s theses are trains of thought that are carefully stopped before they reach the argument that demolishes them.

Progress is the offspring of knowledge of nature.
Faith in progress is the offspring of ignorance of history.

As a criterion of what is best, modern man knows nothing but posteriority.

The progressive’s cardinal syllogism is simply beautiful: the best always triumphs, because what triumphs is called the best.

More repulsive than the future which progressives involuntarily prepare is the future they dream of.

Chance will always rule history, because it is not possible to organize the state in such a way that it does not matter who rules.

In order to renew, it is not necessary to contradict; it is enough to make profounder.

Unlimited gullibility is required to be able to believe that any social condition can be improved in any other way than slowly, gradually, and involuntarily.

Social improvements do not come from powerful shake-ups, but from light nudges.

The golden rule of politics is to make only minimal changes and to make them as slowly as possible.

It does not appear that the humanities, in contrast to the natural sciences, reach a state of maturity where anything idiotic is automatically obvious.

Religious thought does not go forward, like scientific thought, but rather goes deeper.

It is possible to inculcate in the contemporary bourgeois any stupid idea in the name of progress and to sell him any grotesque object in the name of art.

Reason, Progress, and Justice are the three theological virtues of the fool.

Asking the state to do what only society should do is the error of the left.

The leftist, like the polemicist of yesteryear, believes he refutes an opinion by accusing the holder of that opinion of immorality.

The vice which afflicts the right is cynicism, and that which afflicts the left is deceit.

Civilization is what old men manage to salvage from the onslaught of young idealists.

The progressive believes that everything soon becomes obsolete, except his ideas.

The periodic reflowering of what he decrees obsolete makes life bitter for the progressive.

Progress ages badly.
Each generation brings a new model of progressivism and discards with contempt the previous model.
Nothing is more grotesque than yesterday’s progressive.

The frightened progressive has neither compassion nor dignity.

Nothing is more dangerous than to solve ephemeral problems with permanent solutions.

To reform everyone else is an ambition which all mock yet which all nurse. .

The left is a collection of those who blame society for nature’s shabby treatment of them.

Knowing which reforms the world needs is the only unequivocal symptom of stupidity.

The problems of an “underdeveloped” country are the favorite pretext for leftist escapism.
Lacking new merchandise to offer to the European market, the leftist intellectual peddles his faded wares in the third world.

The left does not condemn violence until it hears it pounding on its door.

The individual today rebels against immutable human nature so that he might refrain from amending his own correctable nature.

The preaching of progressives has so corrupted us that nobody believes that he is what he is, but only what he did not succeed in being.

Modern man already knows that political solutions are ludicrous and suspects that economic solutions are too.

Transforming the world: the occupation of a convict resigned to his punishment.

They speak emphatically of “transforming the world,” when the most to which they can aspire is to certain secondary remodelings of society.

Two hundred years ago it was permissible to trust in the future without being totally stupid.
But today, who can believe in the current prophecies, since we are yesterday’s splendid future?

The leftist emulates the devout who continue venerating the relic after the miracle has been proved to be a hoax.

The new left gathers together those who acknowledge the ineffectiveness of the cure without ceasing to believe in the prescription.

Nothing cures the progressive.
Not even the frequent panic attacks administered to him by progress.

The progressive’s enthusiasm, the democrat’s arguments, the materialist’s demonstrations are the reactionary’s delicious and succulent food.

Consumption, for the progressive, is justified only as a means of production.

The new catechists profess that Progress is the modern incarnation of hope.
But Progress is not hope emerging, but the dying echo of hope already vanished.

In the intelligent man faith is the only remedy for anguish.
The fool is cured by “reason,” “progress,” alcohol, work.

The most persuasive reason to renounce daring progressive opinions is the inevitability with which sooner or later the fool finally adopts them.

Man is an animal that can be educated, provided he does not fall into the hands of progressive pedagogues.

When it finishes its “ascent,” humanity will find tedium waiting for it, seated on the highest peak.

Yesterday progressivism captured the unwary by offering them freedom; today all it needs to do is offer them food.

Under the pretext of giving work to the hungry, the progressive sells the useless artifacts he produces.
The poor are industrialism’s pretext for enriching the rich man.

Leftists and rightists merely argue about who is to have possession of industrial society.
The reactionary longs for its death.

The crisis of Christianity today has been provoked not by science, nor by history, but by the new means of communication.
Religious progressivism is the task of adapting Christian doctrines to the opinions sponsored by news agencies and publicity agents.

The modern Christian feels professionally obligated to act jovially and jokingly, to show his teeth in a cheerful grin, to profess a slavering friendliness, in order to prove to the unbeliever that Christianity is not a “somber” religion, a “pessimistic” doctrine, an “ascetic” morality.
The progressive Christian shakes our hand with the wide grin of a politician running for office.