To create change, you have to bring people with you. Britain usually moves too slowly on those matters where it should move fast. But sometimes, as now, it can move too fast on an issue where it should go slower, listen and learn. And with the NHS still at its lowest ebb, this is not the right time to make such a profound decision. Instead, we need to show we can do better at assisted living before deciding whether to legislate on ways to die

Gordon Brown, former Prime Minister, The Guardian, 23 November

Brown believes that the responsibility that now falls on government is clear: to persuade people that we can improve and fund quality end-of-life care and make it available to all on an equitable basis. . . And it is likely that a number of MPs will be influenced by the comments of this, perhaps the most respected member of the eight-strong living former prime ministers’ club

James Macintyre, author of a forthcoming biography of Gordon Brown, The Spectator website, 23 November

Most church goers are in favour of assisted dying. We need to be able to make a free choice about the manner of our death. It is not right that faith leaders or doctors have the right to tell the person suffering that they MUST suffer

Rosie Harper, retired priest, X, 24 November

The idea that someone who is facing death might not want to be a burden, whether due to illness or old age — as some arguments in favour of assisted dying might suggest — is anathema to West African tradition. You can’t be a burden because you are not a separate entity. You’re part of a whole. We live and we breathe and we create families of our own within the context of the wider, interdependent community. We die within that community too

Chine McDonald, director of Theos, blog, 26 November

The Archbishop of Canterbury and religious leaders should try to fill what is obviously an aching spiritual void in people’s lives, that drives them to gorge themselves. . . You talk about living bread of spiritual sustenance. Well, it’s not being provided by the blooming church, I can tell you that much. The living bread is being provided by Tesco and they’re gorging themselves on the real living bread, that’s what they’re doing

Boris Johnson, former Prime Minister, quoted in The Times, 26 November

We invite readers’ contributions. Quotations have to be from the past few days (or quoted therein), and we need author, source, and date. Please send promptly to: quotes@churchtimes.co.uk