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

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.

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.

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

The individual, man as a man, man as a brain, if you like, interests me more than what he makes, because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.

No human creature can give orders to love.

I feel like Obama in a way. His idea that hope means not shrinking from a fight it's the courage to reach for something. My music is that. Those are principles I try to embody.

Winning the World Cup was the worst thing that ever happened to the England team.

The goods we spend we keep; and what we save We lose; and only what we lose we have.

There's nothing that can teach you more than experience.

At parties, I'll start talking and notice everyone is looking at me and feel dumb and say, 'Forget it,' and then start eating things.

I'm really, really emotional.

The free will is a pagan goddess that the Church has worshipped for far too long.

Praise Him, each savage furious beast That on His stores do daily feast; And you tame slaves, of the laborious plough, Your weary knees to your Creator bow.