Polly Toynbee Quotes

How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions?

One in six people suffer depression or a chronic anxiety disorder. These are not the worried well but those in severe mental pain with conditions crippling enough to prevent them living normal lives.

So what really works? Treatments in jail do some good, but it's mostly too late: finding a family and a job or just growing older make most prisoners eventually give up crime.

Islam, Christianity and Judaism all define themselves through disgust of women's bodies.

There is all the difference in the world between teaching children about religion and handing them over to be taught by the religious.

The strongest predictor of unhappiness is anyone who has had a mental illness in the last 10 years. It is an even stronger predictor of unhappiness than poverty - which also ranks highly.

But the single overwhelming reason why jails are bursting is longer sentences given for more crimes.

Thresholds of pain, indignity and incapacity are entirely personal.

Crime is only the worst example, but it is a paradigm for other Labour policy disasters. No one tells the voters that crime is falling: let them stay scared senseless.

Most people come to fear not death itself, but the many terrible ways of dying.

This is indeed a clash of civilisations, not between Islam and Christendom but between reason and superstition.

The best care on earth cannot prevent us all dying in the end.

In the polls, over 80% support the right to die and have done for the last 25 years. Even 80% of practising Catholics and Protestants support it, plus 76% of Church Times readers.

Working lives are for the state to influence. Unemployment makes people unhappy. So does instability.

Openness about death has led to greater care about all aspects of dying.

People want the right to die at a time of their own choosing. Too many families have watched helplessly as a relative dies slowly, longing for death.

But instead of standing up for reason, our government is handing education over to the world of faith.

Nothing keeps people together like the exalted conviction that they alone are to be spared that eternal anguish of hell fire to which everyone else will be condemned.