Some level of truthfulness has always been seen as essential to human society, no matter how deficient the observance of other moral principles.

Psychologists have found that we are more likely, in looking back at our lives, to remember high points and dramatic shifts in far greater proportion than ongoing stretches of happiness or misery.

Empathy and fellow feeling form the very basis of morality. The capacities for empathy, for feeling responsibility toward others and for reaching out to help them can be stunted or undermined early on, depending on a child's experiences in the home and neighborhood. It becomes too easy to turn our backs on fellow human beings... to have 'compassion fatigue.' Technology, we are learning, is not neutral.

We are all, in a sense, experts on secrecy. From earliest childhood we feel its mystery and attraction. We know both the power it confers and the burden it imposes. We learn how it can delight, give breathing space and protect.

Secrecy is as indispensable to human beings as fire, and as greatly feared.

Deceit and violence - these are the two forms of deliberate assault on human beings.

Are people the best judges of their own happiness, or outsiders? In defining happiness, should we think of entire lives or of shorter periods such as moments, days, or years? And to what extent are virtue and happiness linked?