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.

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 did as much research as I could and I took ownership of this illness, because if you don't take care of your body, where are you going to live?

Though bitter, good medicine cures illness. Though it may hurt, loyal criticism will have beneficial effects.

I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.

Everybody believes in psychiatry; it's supposed to be for our own good. Let psychiatry prove that anybody has an illness, and I'd concede, but there is no physical proof.

An illness is like a journey into a far country; it sifts all one's experience and removes it to a point so remote that it appears like a vision.

I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial.

A lot of our entertainment throws into detail the stagnation and illness of how we live today-it's sad and it's sick... and it's profitable.

It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.

Advances in technology and in our understanding of illness and disease together with an expanded workforce and greater resources will allow us to provide more services to a higher quality.

I didn't want to do a zoo show. I didn't want to do a study of someone with mental illness. I just wanted to show someone who was trying to live their life.

Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.

All countries should immediately now activate their pandemic preparedness plans. Countries should remain on high alert for unusual outbreaks of influenza-like illness and severe pneumonia.

The good thing about having this illness is that it allows me to be a little bit crazy.

Stress is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of mental illness.

People who cannot find time for recreation are obliged sooner or later to find time for illness.

A transfer of money should never be involved in this profound situation. Although illness is profound, too, but medicine's a business today. It's a business.

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.

I don't think there is one cause of Gulf War illness.

Cases of sickness made up a very small percentage which in my opinion was normal. However, propaganda pamphlets dropped from aircraft were telling the workers to feign illness, and detailed instructions were given to them on how to do it.

Fear is a question: What are you afraid of, and why? Just as the seed of health is in illness, because illness contains information, your fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if you explore them.

I'm fine, but I'm bipolar. I'm on seven medications, and I take medication three times a day. This constantly puts me in touch with the illness I have. I'm never quite allowed to be free of that for a day. It's like being a diabetic.

I did not fully understand the dread term 'terminal illness' until I saw Heathrow for myself.

The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you.