Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Religions . . . seem to avoid mountain passes.
I am from Scotland, and I am Christian, not Muslim.
I have never met a villager who does not want a vote.
I'm not good at explaining why I walked across Afghanistan.
Being a backbench MP is a bit of an anti-climax for a superhero.
The question shouldn't be what we ought to do, but what we can do.
I had a lot of romantic notions about what it would mean to cross Asia by foot.
In some sense, I'm a romantic. I like the idea of organic history and tradition.
It was a bit of a surprise when I became a Tory MP. My friends said it was a stupid idea.
Democracy is not simply a question of structures. It is a state of mind. It is an activity.
Despite the dubious statistics … democracy is a thing of value for which we should be fighting.
This idea that failure is not an option: It makes failure invisible, inconceivable and inevitable.
Politics feels, on what I have seen of it, like joining a tribe, and a lot of it is about unspoken ways of behaving.
I have planted over 6,000 trees at home in Scotland, some of them oak. I'd like my children to be able to watch them grow.
Democracy is not simply a question of structures. It is a state of mind. It is an activity. And part of that activity is honesty.
I did stuff for three years in Kabul that I found exciting, and a lot of that was fixing roofs, talking about sewage installation.
If things are going wrong in a country, it's not usually that we don't have enough foreigners. It's usually that we have too many.
I like connecting to places by foot, and I'm interested in experiencing how somewhere like Crieff connects to somewhere like London.
When you're doing mountain rescue, you don't take a doctorate in mountain rescue; you look for somebody who knows the terrain. It's about context.
Nostalgia for dead tyrants and the longing for heroes are unhealthy, and they can result in the deification of a Saddam as easily as a Havel or Mandela.
The politicians think the journalists have power, the journalists think bankers have power, bankers think lawyers have power. The truth is, nobody has power.
If we say the purpose of life is our children, that's neither a purpose nor a meaning. But I'm sure I will be as besotted as everybody else when I have them.
When my father was posted to Malaysia, we'd take bacon-and-egg sandwiches in our backpacks and go hiking in the jungle or make bamboo rafts to sail down rivers.
The world isnt one way or another. Things can be changed very, very rapidly by someone with sufficient confidence, sufficient knowledge and sufficient authority.
If democracy is to be rebuilt … it is necessary not just for the public to learn to trust their politicians, but for the politicians to learn to trust the public.
The world isn't one way or another. Things can be changed very, very rapidly by someone with sufficient confidence, sufficient knowledge and sufficient authority.
I had been walking one afternoon in Scotland and thought: Why don't I just keep going? There was, I said, a magic in leaving a line of footprints stretching across Asia.
I found that Scottishness and Englishness are actually strong, instinctive things, whatever the historical reasons. Even the accent changes - just two inches across the border.
I think one of the odd things about public life, coming from the outside, is that people seem to be paranoid. Maybe they were quite frank initially, but then they did one thing which went wrong.
I have not met, in Afghanistan, in even the most remote community, anybody who does not want a say in who governs them. Most remote community, I have never met a villager who does not want a vote.
In the British embassy in Afghanistan in 2008, an embassy of 350 people, there were only three people who could speak Dari, the main language of Afghanistan, at a decent level. And there was not a single Pashto speaker.
The point about democracy is not that it delivers legitimate, effective, prosperous rule of law. It's not that it guarantees peace with itself or with its neighbors. ... Democracy matters because it reflects an idea of equality.
If a relationship is going wrong, if a marriage is going wrong, the answer cannot simply be to say, 'You can't afford to break up because you are going to lose the house.' The answer has to be only one thing, which is 'I love you.'
The thing that interests me most about Scotland is how we differ from our neighbours. How do our ambitions differ? What kind of society are we? What can we learn from the mistakes of the past, and how do we position ourselves in the world?
I found incredible kindness, dignity and hospitality in both Iraq and Afghanistan - am only alive because of it - the most worthwhile lesson of a twenty month walk to these countries was a deepening appreciation of the kindness of strangers.
Democracy matters because it reflects an idea of equality and an idea of liberty. It reflects an idea of dignity, the dignity of the individual, the idea that each individual should have an equal vote, an equal say, in the formation of their government.
September 11th has produced only miniature heroes because our culture has freed itself from many of the old, dangerous, elitist fantasies of heroism... But in so doing, we have not only tamed and diminished heroes. We have risked taming and diminishing ourselves.
The Taliban, broadly speaking, are Afghans - farmers, subsistence farmers. As I say, most of those people can't find the United States on the map. Al Qaeda, traditionally, are much more educated, middle-class people, often from Egypt, from Saudi Arabia, North Africa.
I'd like to come back to the West eventually. In the end abroad I am always a stranger, active politics in particular is not accessible to me and although people are generous, I can never be on the inside of a culture that relies a great deal on the private space and the family.
For politicians to be honest, the public needs to allow them to be honest, and the media, which mediates between the politicians and the public, needs to allow those politicians to be honest. If local democracy is to flourish, it is about the active and informed engagement of every citizen.
In the mountains, travelers were reduced to the speed of men on foot. Here, the ancient English sense of journey, 'a day's travel' (French journee), meant the same as the Old Persian word farsang, 'the distance a man could travel on foot in a day,' and the territory was in effect ungovernable.
I don't know much about Britain. I've been working overseas for most of my adult life. So I'd like to see what sort of problems there really are here. It's a question of asking, 'Where are we going, how purposeful are we?' And see if there's anything that can be done to find possibilities for change.
I have a constituency with 52,000 people and a million sheep. I was in one village where a local kid was run over by a tractor. They took him to Carlisle, but they couldn't be bothered to wait at the hospital. So they put him in a darkened room for two weeks, then said he was fine. But I'm not so sure he was.
I left things out - my motivations, my history, my emotional responses - because I am not good at understanding them or writing about them. I tried and it was generally boring and always unconvincing. Most importantly I wanted to try to place Afghans and Afghanistan in the foreground rather than my own character.
As a Scot, I instinctively feel a sympathy towards a culture which is based on generosity. It's very refreshing. Afghans think they're the best people in the world and their country is the best place in the world, and it's strange because you go there and it doesn't really look like it, and yet they assume that everybody else envies them.
The Afghan government is much better informed, much more intrusive and ambitious than I had guessed. There are amazing craftsmen in Kabul but few designers and wage rates are astonishingly high - which is a problem when trying to support and promote Afghan craft exports. The community in Murad Khani in the old city - who we are helping to restore their area - have been the best part so far - eccentric, led by a champion wrestler, determined, proud and courageous.
I do a lot of work with policymakers, but how much effect am I having? It’s like they’re coming in and saying to you, ‘I’m going to drive my car off a cliff. Should I or should I not wear a seatbelt?’ And you say, ‘I don’t think you should drive your car off the cliff.’ And they say, ‘No, no, that bit’s already been decided—the question is whether to wear a seatbelt.’ And you say, ‘Well, you might as well wear a seatbelt.’ And then they say, ‘We’ve consulted with policy expert Rory Stewart and he says . . . .’
Change can only come from local citizens and politicians - it cannot be imposed by well-meaning foreigners - not least because a society like Afghanistan or Iraq is suspicious of outsiders and often resistant to change. I am not going to get drawn into the ethics of intervening in other countries. My concern is the practical question. Can you actually achieve change in this way? My guess is we can stop wars sometimes as in the Balkans and topple regimes - but that the other stuff - such as corruption is not within our power to effect and alter.