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All Polly Toynbee Quotes
Working lives are for the state to influence. Unemployment makes people unhappy. So does instability.
Polly Toynbee
62% of people like this quote
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.
Polly Toynbee
60% of people like this quote
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.
Polly Toynbee
59% of people like this quote
The best care on earth cannot prevent us all dying in the end.
Polly Toynbee
58% of people like this quote
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.
Polly Toynbee
58% of people like this quote
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.
Polly Toynbee
58% of people like this quote
Openness about death has led to greater care about all aspects of dying.
Polly Toynbee
57% of people like this quote
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.
Polly Toynbee
57% of people like this quote
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.
Polly Toynbee
57% of people like this quote
Thresholds of pain, indignity and incapacity are entirely personal.
Polly Toynbee
56% of people like this quote
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.
Polly Toynbee
56% of people like this quote
There is all the difference in the world between teaching children about religion and handing them over to be taught by the religious.
Polly Toynbee
55% of people like this quote
Most people come to fear not death itself, but the many terrible ways of dying.
Polly Toynbee
55% of people like this quote
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.
Polly Toynbee
54% of people like this quote
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?
Polly Toynbee
53% of people like this quote
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