Polly Toynbee Quotes

27 quotes in 560 categories

• Openness about death has led to greater care about all aspects of dying.
• Most people come to fear not death itself, but the many terrible ways of dying.
• There is all the difference in the world between teaching children about religion and handing them over to be taught by the religious.
• The pens sharpen – Islamophobia! No such thing. Primitive Middle Eastern religions (and most others) are much the same – Islam, Christianity and Judaism all…
• Islam, Christianity and Judaism all define themselves through disgust of women's bodies.
• Thresholds of pain, indignity and incapacity are entirely personal.
• But how odd that in this heathen nation of empty pews, where churches' bare, ruined choirs are converted into luxury loft living, a Labour government…
• 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…
• 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:…
• But instead of standing up for reason, our government is handing education over to the world of faith.
• Is anyone serious about the politics of happiness? David Cameron dipped a toe in the water, using the word lightly, but denying the hard policies…
• Inequality makes everyone unhappy, the poor most of all, and that is well within the remit of the state. More money gives less extra happiness…
• Happiness is a real, objective phenomenon, scientifically verifiable. That means people and whole societies can now be measured over time and compared accurately with one…
• But the single overwhelming reason why jails are bursting is longer sentences given for more crimes.
• Working lives are for the state to influence. Unemployment makes people unhappy. So does instability.
• 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…
• 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…
• The best care on earth cannot prevent us all dying in the end.
• My mother begged doctors to end her life. She was beyond the physical ability to swallow enough of the weak morphine pills she had around…
• 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…

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