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.

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 another. Causes and cures for unhappiness can be quantified.

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.

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.

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.

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 it implies. Labour shies away from it, but should take up the challenge.

Thresholds of pain, indignity and incapacity are entirely personal.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

My Lords temporal, today is the day to rise up against the regiment of Lords spiritual and proclaim the values of enlightenment, compassion and common sense.

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.

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?

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

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 - yes, a Labour government - is deliberately creating a huge expansion of faith schools.

Could a government dare to set out with happiness as its goal? Now that there are accepted scientific proofs, it would be easy to audit the progress of national happiness annually, just as we monitor money and GDP.

It is now possible to quantify people's levels of happiness pretty accurately by asking them, by observation, and by measuring electrical activity in the brain, in degrees from terrible pain to sublime joy.

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 the richer we get, yet we are addicted to earning and spending more every year.

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 her. When she knew she was dying I promised to make sure she could go at a time of her choosing, but it was impossible. I couldn't help.

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

The Humanist view of life is progressive and optimistic in awe of human potential living without fear of judgement and death finding enough purpose and meaning in life love and leaving a good legacy.

I think we all have blocks between us and the best version of ourselves, whether it's shyness, insecurity, anxiety, whether it's a physical block, and the story of a person overcoming that block to their best self. It's truly inspiring because I think all of us are engaged in that every day.

Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety.

At some stages of your life you will deal with things and at others you are overwhelmed with misery and anxiety.

I think it is important to ask ourselves as citizens, not as Democrats attacking the administration, but as citizens, whether a world power can really provide global leadership on the basis of fear and anxiety?

Anthropology never has had a distinct subject matter, and because it doesn't have a real method, there's a great deal of anxiety over what it is.

The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.

When a parent shows up with an attitude of entitlement, understand that under it is a boatload of anxiety.

And to me, it was interesting, some of the people I had interviewed who knew the insides to this program said that they also, to create anxiety and upset in the soldiers, they take Bibles and they trash them.

Exploiting people's emotions of fear, envy and anxiety is not hope, it's not change, it's partisanship. We don't need partisanship. We don't need demagoguery, we need solutions.

Aware that his disappointment has its source in a defective education, he looks with anxiety on his other daughters, whose minds, like lovely buds, are beginning to open. Where shall he find a genial soil in which he may place them to expand?

A premium in the oil price of somewhere between 10 to 15 dollars a barrel reflects this heightened anxiety.

Kindness is the cause of all anxiety.

It has been said that our anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, but only empties today of its strength.

But sometimes in the midst of worry, anxiety and hard work, it has been pretty hard to bear all these false reports going about the country - to see my friends alienated and being made to believe things that were absolutely false.

That's the duty of the old, to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.

I often thought I was in the wrong business. I was pretty seriously thinking of tossing it in before I shot Shine. I do not know why. I was pretty restless, I had been through a bad period of stress induced anxiety - panic attacks - and I was not sure of what I wanted to do.

Good humor is a tonic for mind and body. It is the best antidote for anxiety and depression. It is a business asset. It attracts and keeps friends. It lightens human burdens. It is the direct route to serenity and contentment.

What I wasn't prepared for were the feelings of anxiety that it stirred in me. I wasn't prepared for the initial feeling of I don't want to have to do that again. I was scared.

It is not the least anxiety that we have so little powder and lead on hand.

I think the dangers are different now. Our abuse of the planet and our resources is an anxiety.

For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art.

A large part of the present anxiety to improve the education of girls and women is also due to the conviction that the political disabilities of women will not be maintained.

I had a lot of time to think, and that is not good for your mind. And when it actually happened, it was not so much a celebration but the relief. It was an exorcism anxiety. After each race there is a procedure in which you get taken off to the podium and the TV interviews.