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

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.

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

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

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.

Thresholds of pain, indignity and incapacity are entirely personal.

We cannot change the history of the past.

Don't rely on labels to give you the information you need. Trust only the ingredient list and your gut.

Our aversion to lying is commonly a secret ambition to make what we say considerable, and have every word received with a religious respect.

People make the mistake of talking about 'natural laws.' There are no natural laws. There are only temporary habits of nature.

In America, the term younger poet is applied with chivalric liberality. It can be used to describe anyone not yet collecting a Social Security pension.

Actually, the world and America is upset and the only way to bring about a change is to upset it more.

Veganism must be the baseline if we are to have any hope of shifting the paradigm away from animals as things and toward animals as nonhuman persons.

These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.

Night-dreams trace on Memory's wall Shadows of the thoughts of day, And thy fortunes, as they fall, The bias of the will betray.

Examine thus yourself from every side. Note harmful thoughts and every futile striving. Thus it is that heroes in the bodhisattva path Apply the remedies to keep a steady mind.