Time & Perspective Quote by William Ralph Inge

History, Inge implies, is less a record than a sorting hat: it shuffles the past into two bins, the fabricated and the irrelevant. The line lands because it’s delivered with the cool certainty of a man whose job description includes moral seriousness. That clerical authority gives the cynicism teeth. He isn’t merely cracking a paradox; he’s warning that our reverence for “what happened” can be misplaced, either because the story is mythmaking or because the fact, even if true, doesn’t cash out into meaning.

The phrasing “roughly divided” is the tell. It’s a wink at the arrogance of historical tidiness: we crave clean categories, but the best we can do is approximate. Then comes the deadpan twist - not “true versus false,” but “probably never happened” versus “does not matter.” That second category is the sharper insult. Inge is needling the antiquarian impulse to treat every crumb of the past as sacred simply because it is old, a temptation especially strong in institutions (churches included) built on tradition.

Context matters: Inge lived through the age when “scientific history” and mass education promised a more rigorous relationship to the past, even as propaganda and nationalist legend-writing industrialized untruth. His aphorism registers that tension. It also contains a practical theology: the point of memory isn’t completeness; it’s moral and civic relevance. The subtext is almost pastoral in its austerity - don’t confuse trivia with wisdom, and don’t confuse comforting stories with reality.