There are two kinds of fools: one says, "This is old, therefore it is good"; the other says, "This is new, therefore it is better."

William Ralph Inge (1860–1954), the Anglican priest and long-serving Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, was a prominent English essayist and public intellectual known for epigrams about modernity, progress, and cultural change. The remark reflects a recurring theme in his writing and lectures in the early 20th century, when rapid technological and social transformation encouraged both nostalgia for inherited traditions and uncritical enthusiasm for novelty. Inge frequently criticized fashionable “progress” when it became a substitute for judgment, while also warning against mere traditionalism. This aphorism belongs to that broader polemical stance: a call to evaluate ideas and practices on their merits rather than on their age.

Inge’s point is that two opposite biases can be equally irrational: revering something simply because it is old (appeal to tradition) and preferring something simply because it is new (appeal to novelty). By labeling both attitudes “foolish,” he argues for discriminating judgment—testing claims, institutions, and innovations by evidence, usefulness, and moral or intellectual worth rather than by chronology. The epigram also suggests that cultural debates often polarize into reaction and faddishness, with both sides avoiding the harder work of evaluation. Its enduring appeal lies in how neatly it punctures the rhetoric of “the good old days” and the salesmanship of “new and improved.”