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"Working lives are for the state to influence. Unemployment makes people unhappy. So does instability."
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Explore more quotes by Polly Toynbee
"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."
"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?"
"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."
"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."
"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."
"But instead of standing up for reason, our government is handing education over to the world of faith."
"Working lives are for the state to influence. Unemployment makes people unhappy. So does instability."
"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."
"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."
Exlpore more People quotes
"The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone."
"It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other."
"There are bad people who would be less dangerous if they were quite devoid of goodness."
"Whatever good things people say of us, they tell us nothing new."
"There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating - people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing."
"People are lucky and unlucky not according to what they get absolutely, but according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect."
"We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones."
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