Stress means something different if it is the result of rewarding work rather than struggling to keep the family out of debt.

On social networking sites, we may expose ourselves, but we choose to do so. We are in control and, often wrongly, we do not feel we are giving away tradable data.

The greatest moral failing is to condemn something as a moral failing: no vice is worse than being judgmental.

I think that internet technologies are making everything so transparent. The arms race of deception and spin against the public trying to keep up with it - I think the forces of spin have to lose. In the corporate world people are finding this. Corporate social responsibility has been on the agenda for a very long time - and a lot of people say it's a kind of green-wash or white-wash - but because there's nowhere to hide anymore, people are coming around to the realization that the only way to be seen to be good is to be good. You can't fake it.

Cooking can be rewarding when it is a choice and no longer the onerous duty of the housewife, and when a dishwasher can lighten the load at the other end of the process.

For most people their ideal life involves an intimate relationship with another person; one which often has a sexual basis. But there's no logic about it; why shouldn't people choose to live together with someone they just like? 'Of course' if we were too unquestioning about it, and we said 'well, that person has got to be someone of the opposite sex, and it's got to be for life, and divorce is terrible', then we're stuck. But if you don't recognize the importance that kind of bond has for human beings - you can't really understand what is needed to live a good life.

Truth and Truthfulness is an ambitious work, and its journeys into history give it a breadth unusual in these days of increased academic specialization. . . . William's book combines real history and fictional constructs to tell a revealing story that makes us reconsider the meaning of familiar concepts.