If Noah took two of every animal on his ark, he must have had dinosaurs. Could dinosaurs have fitted into a boat only 300 cubits (about 135m) long?
Nothing is as good as solitude. The only thing I need to make me perfectly happy is someone to whom I could explain this.
And yet the institution the caliphate had been in decline long before Turkish republicans deposed Abdul-Majid II, the last Ottoman sultan and titular caliph, who ended his years in Paris painting and collecting butterflies.
A Bible in a bedside table drawer does not constitute a state establishment of religion.
Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.
Victor Hugo supposedly said, "He who opens a school door closes a prison."
One of the contractors in question is Aker, a listed Norwegian firm no more related to Reliance than Roald Amundsen was to Gandhi.
The world's 1.6 billion Muslims have produced only two Nobel laureates in chemistry and physics. Both moved to the West. In the ninth century Muhammad al-Khwarizmi laid down the principles of algebra, a word derived from the name of his book, "Kitab al-Jabr".
The sight of a southerner in the Vatican will be as important, in its way, as the arrival of the first black man in the White House.
"Atheisf' has many negative connotations: irreligious, ungodly, unholy, graceless, sceptic, doubter, and so on. But ask a question about what atheists subscribe to — rationalism, logic, science and positivism — and a majority of people will admit that they adhere to such principles. Then ask an alternative question covering the prevalent aspects of most religions: "Do you subscribe to metaphysics, superstition, bigotry or dogmatism?', and the majority will deny such practice.
The rulers of ancient Rome were ruthlessly pragmatic in matters of religion. When a tribe was subdued and its lands added to the imperial realm, Rome would appropriate the subject-people's gods and add them to an ever-growing pantheon of exotic divinities.
There's something for everybody, which means there's something for everybody to hate.
The Mormon church is probably the best-organised in the world and certainly the most cost-effective. The president and his 12 advisers sit at the top like the board of a multinational. Below them, the church depends on a throng of lay volunteers. Church members begin to perform in public at the age of three. They become "deacons" at 12 and are given more demanding jobs as they grow older. The faithful are expected to give 10% of their pre-tax income to the church. No one knows how much money it has, but unofficial estimates are in the billions.
Beast, a clothes shop, makes T-shirts celebrating local speech that are famed city-wide (and sold to homesick Bristolians worldwide). Top-selling shirts proclaim "Gert Lush" (slang for "good"), "Ark at ee" (look at/listen to that) and "Cheers Drive" (used when stepping off a Bristol bus).
Wanted: man of God; good at languages; preferably under 75; extensive pastoral experience; no record of covering up clerical sex abuse, deeply spiritual and, mentally, tough as old boots. It is a lot to ask, but that is the emerging profile of the man many of his fellow-cardinals would like to see replace Benedict XVI as the next pope.
After all, as most of those who have been bitten by the philosophy bug will know, philosophers philosophise mainly because they cannot help it.
By nature a philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so different from a street porter, as a mastiff is from a greyhound, or a greyhound. The real root of wisdom is this: do not assume, little grasshopper, that your prejudices are correct.
The rules we learn from Cicero are these: speak clearly; speak easily but not too much, especially when others want their turn; do not interrupt; be courteous; deal seriously with serious matters and gracefully with lighter ones; never criticise people behind their backs; stick to subjects of general interest; do not talk about yourself; and, above all, never lose your temper.
Old jokes are often the best jokes, and many of the most amusing examples are of terrible errors that can be made in different languages: there is fart (Turkish for talking nonsense), buzz (Arabic for nipple), sofa (Icelandic for sleep), shagit (Albanian for crawling on your belly), jam (Mongolian for road), nob (Wolof for love), dad (Albanian for babysitter), loo (Fulani for a storage pot), babe (SisSwati for a government minister), slug (Gaulish for servant), flab (Gaelic for a mushroom) and moron (Welsh for carrot).
Scores of native speakers of around 50 languages, including Arabic, Dari, Persian, Urdu, Pushtu and Bengali, have been hired — some say the NYPD has more Arabic speakers than the FBI. It has, at times, irritated both the CIA and the FBI, who are jealous guardians of their turf.
Three Egypt's Coptic Christian bishops will be elected 40 days after She- nouda's death and then a blindfolded child will select the new patriarch from among the three, as ancient tradition dictates.
But being right and being seen to be right are different things.
English has a tendency to absorb foreign words and then neutralise them — ad hoc, feng shui, croissant and kindergarten are all good examples — which may be why English-speakers often fail to realise quite how wonderfully subtle and evocative other tongues can be.
It is not so much the languages that have two dozen words for snow, say, or horse or walrus carcass that impress the most, but those that draw differences between the seemingly indistinguishable. Italian, as one would imagine, is particularly good on male vanity, and French on love as a business. The richness of Yiddish for insults seems to be matched only by the many and varied Japanese words for the deep joy that can come as a response to beauty and the German varieties of sadness and disappointment.
Adam Jacot de Boinod, a BBC researcher, has sifted through more than 280 dictionaries and 140 websites to discover that Albanians have 27 words for moustache — including mustaqe madh for bushy and mustaqe posht for one which droops down at both ends — that gin is Phrygian for drying out, that the Dutch say plimpplamppletteren when they are skimming stones and that instead of snap, crackle, pop, Rice Krispies in the Netherlands go Knisper!
Now for the first time he had become conscious of the terrible mystery of Destiny, of the awful meaning of Doom.
Translation into Spanglish of the first few pages of Cervantes's "Don Quixote". It begins: "In un placete de la Mancha of which nombre no qui- ero remembrearme, vivia, not so long ago, uno de esos gentlemen who always tienen una lanza in the rack, una buckler antigua, a skinny ca- ballo y un grayhound para el chase."
Thirteen languages in Germany are on UNESCO's endangered list.
Mr Ellemann-Jensen explained the idea by reference to Hamlet: "To be or not to be, that is the question. To be and not to be, that is the answer."
Hercules, demigod and paragon of masculinity in the ancient world, was indirectly done for by his own sexual prowess — his jealous wife, Deianira.
I scoff at Tuyuca and Kwaio for having only two words for "we", inclusive and exclusive. In English we have three: the regular we meaning you and I, as in "we had dinner together"; the royal we meaning I, as in "we are not amused"; and the marital we meaning you, as in "we need to take out the garbage."
Travel was not just about seeing, but about being seen.
Muslims are obliged to go on the haj at least once in their lifetime. So many pilgrims want to make the journey that the Saudis now impose strict national quotas (calculated according to national populations) on pilgrims. Once arrived, they begin their rituals: the changing into simple white clothes, the tawaf or circumambulation of the ka'ba, the drinking at the sacred Zamzam well, the prescribed running and collecting of pebbles, the shaving or cutting of one's hair and the renewed commitment to the principles of Islam.