Welcome to our first monthly collection of quotes for 2026!
The Christians stole the winter solstice from the pagans, and capitalism stole it from the Christians.
[George Monbiot]
We all carry within us places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and others.
[Albert Camus]
Re-examine all that you have been told … dismiss that which insults your soul.
[Walt Whitman]
Realise that you don’t know how lucky you are to live in a country that says, “No, the clergy cannot determine through the state what you may think, what you may do, with whom you may sleep, what you may eat, what you may read”.
[Christopher Hitchens]
Do not spring vengeance upon a defecating enemy and do not disturb him … it dishonours you to harm someone in that condition … In public, your bottom should emit no secret winds past your thighs. It disgraces you if other people notice any of your smelly filth.
[The Book of the Civilised Man; 12th century table manners]
Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.
[Mark Twain]
A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.
[Arthur Schopenhauer]
Shit life syndrome is by far the biggest determinant of ill-health. We all need decent jobs, diets, a living income, green space, shelter, security, friends, clean air, purpose & kindness. If we focus on these, the economy & NHS will thrive. If we don’t, chronic illness will win.
[Dr Phil Hammond, Twitter]
Aristotle and Maslow both accepted that basic needs such as physiological (food, health and clothing); safety (shelter, education, job security); love & belonging needs (friendship), must exist before an individual, or society, can thrive & develop. Ignore these and society fails.
[Martin Myers, Twitter]
Women, as they get older, become juicier and sexier, more embedded in their truth and who they are, more powerful, and more able to walk through the world caring less. And that is an empowering thing.
[Kate Winslet]
We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or we can rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.
[Abraham Lincoln]
Seek out a tree and let it teach you stillness.
[Eckhart Tolle]
In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.
[Leo Tolstoy]
People think because a novel’s invented, it isn’t true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Because a novel’s invented, it is true. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can’t include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that. The novelist himself lays it down. His decision is binding. The biographer, even at his highest and best, can be only tentative, empirical. The autobiographer, for his part, is imprisoned in his own egotism. He must always be suspect. In contrast with the other two, the novelist is a god, creating his man, making him breathe and walk. The man, created in his own image, provides information about the god. In a sense you know more about Balzac and Dickens from their novels, than Rousseau and Casanova from their Confessions.
[Anthony Powell; Hearing Secret Harmonies]