Wit & Attitude Quote by Francois Rabelais

Rabelais lobs four questions like a barroom debate dressed in clerical robes: not to flatter “the present,” but to expose how quickly we turn time into a moral ranking system. The first jab targets a lazy modern reflex - the smug assumption that “antiquity” was benighted simply because it’s old. The second flips the blade: if you’re so sure the past was foolish, what evidence makes the present wise besides your proximity to it?

The trick is that he never supplies an answer because the real object under interrogation isn’t history; it’s authority. “Who made it foolish? Who made it wise?” drags the reader to the backstage where these labels get assigned. Wisdom and folly, Rabelais implies, aren’t objective properties stored in eras like wine in a cellar. They’re verdicts delivered by institutions: churches, courts, universities, the self-appointed “serious people” of any century who benefit from declaring some ideas mature and others childish.

Context matters here. Rabelais wrote in a Renaissance moment obsessed with recovering classical learning while also weaponizing it. Humanists could praise antiquity to undermine medieval scholasticism; traditionalists could dismiss novelty as heresy. As a clergyman with a satirist’s appetite, he watches these factions use “the past” and “the present” as props in a power struggle.

The intent is destabilizing: if “wise” is something we manufacture, then the real question becomes who gets to manufacture it. That’s not antiquarian nitpicking; it’s a warning about any age that confuses its current consensus with truth.