The sins of a society are revealed in its pieties. - Mark Forsyth

There are two important trees in the Garden of Eden: the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. We chose the wrong one. The fruit of the Tree of Life would have given us immortality. The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge informed us that we were nude, which, as knowledge goes, is pretty low down the list of amazing facts.

Browne gave to the English language the glory of the preposterously long sentence: sentences that nobody in their right minds would ever say aloud, sentences that are intricate games, filled with fine flourishes and curious convolutions. Such sentences have a remarkable quality: civilisation.

Hypotaxis is unnatural in English; nobody would ever say a sentence like the one above. You have to think calmly for a long time to come up with a good hypotactic sentence, and so a good hypotactic sentence tells the reader that you have been thinking calmly for long time. An angry drunk might shout paratactically; only a just and gentle mind can be hypotactic.

Saint Peter and Saint John were idiots simply because they were laymen. They had no qualifications and were therefore their own men, rather than belonging to some professional class. If they had spoken their own language it would have been an idiom, and if they had been eccentrics with their own way of doing things (which they undoubtedly were) they would have been idiosyncratic.