Rory Stewart Quotes & Sayings

Everyone had memorized a chant of names and villages along footpaths in every direction. This was a very useful map. — Rory Stewart

Despite the dubious statistics ... democracy is a thing of value for which we should be fighting. — Rory Stewart

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. — Rory Stewart

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. — Rory Stewart

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. — Rory Stewart

Genghis Khan's 'arrow messengers' could travel 450 kilometers a day. — Rory Stewart

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. — Rory Stewart

I did stuff for three years in Kabul that I found exciting, and a lot of that was fixing roofs, talking about sewage installation. — Rory Stewart

I'm not good at explaining why I walked across Afghanistan. — Rory Stewart

The politicians think the journalists have power, the journalists think bankers have power, bankers think lawyers have power. The truth is, nobody has power. — Rory Stewart

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. — Rory Stewart

I want to 'normalise' myself. I would love to have a family. — Rory Stewart

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. — Rory Stewart

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. — Rory Stewart

In the evening [the Iraqi interim governor of Maysan province] asked me for fifty dollars to repair his windows, which had been destroyed in a recent demonstration. Although he was the governor, his salary was only four hundred and fifty dollars a month, and Baghdad had still not agreed to give the governors an independent budget ... For the sake of a tiny sum of money - a couple thousand dollars a month from the hundred billion we had spent on the invasion - we were alienating our key partner and successor.
p. 264 — Rory Stewart

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. — Rory Stewart

I thought about evolutionary historians who argued that walking was a central part of what it meant to be human. Our two-legged motion was what first differentiated us from the apes. It freed our hands for tools and carried us onthe long marches out of Africa. As a species, we colonized the world on foot. Most of human history was created through contacts conducted at walking pace, even when some rode horses. I thought of the pilgrimages to Compostela in Spain; to Mecca; to the source of the Ganges; and of wandering dervishes, sadhus; and friars who approached God on foot. The Buddha meditated by walking and Wordsworth composed sonnets while striding beside the lakes.
Bruce Chatwin concluded from all this that we would think and live better and be closer to our purpose as humans if we moved continually on foot across the surface of the earth. I was not sure I was living or thinking any better. — Rory Stewart

Religions . . . seem to avoid mountain passes. — Rory Stewart

He [Babur] was a type of mastiff, bred to fight against wolves, dogs, and humans. . . . The mastiff is perhaps the oldest breed of dog in the world. . . . The dogs of Ghor . . . were always regarded as particularly special mastiffs. . . . 'so powerful that in frame and strength every one of them is a match for a lion. — Rory Stewart

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. — Rory Stewart

I like connecting to places by foot, and I'm interested in experiencing how somewhere like Crieff connects to somewhere like London. — Rory Stewart

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. — Rory Stewart

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. — Rory Stewart

The owl loves its nest in the ruins, The Huma revels in making kings, The falcon will not leave the King's hand, And the wagtail pleads weakness.2 — Rory Stewart

Unlike most travel writers, he [Babur] is honest. — Rory Stewart

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.' — Rory Stewart

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. — Rory Stewart

The question shouldn't be what we ought to do, but what we can do. — Rory Stewart

I had a lot of romantic notions about what it would mean to cross Asia by foot. — Rory Stewart

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. — Rory Stewart

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. — Rory Stewart

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. — Rory Stewart

Being a backbench MP is a bit of an anti-climax for a superhero. — Rory Stewart

I went to watch the Buzkasgu game taking place on a series of fields - some fallow, some plowed and planted- just to the east of the empty Buddha niches. Buzkashi is a form of polo played with a dead goat instead of a ball. — Rory Stewart

Steep curving stone stairs led to a square library on the floor above. The 4,000 books in the library were mostly collected between 1710 and 1730. ... For a moment I was tempted to ask to be locked in. If I could skim ten books a day for a year, I would be able to get a sense of most of what David Hume might have read in 1730 -- an age when it still might just have been possible to read everything. — Rory Stewart

This idea that failure is not an option: It makes failure invisible, inconceivable and inevitable. — Rory Stewart

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. — Rory Stewart

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.
— Rory Stewart

I am from Scotland, and I am Christian, not Muslim. — Rory Stewart

My feet beat out a steady muffled rhythm. My thoughts participated in each step, never getting ahead of me. — Rory Stewart

Finally a soldier marched in and, holding his right hand to his chest, said, "Salaam aleikum. Chetor hastid? Jan-e-shoma jur ast? Khub hastid? Sahat-e-shoma khub ast? Be khair hastid? Jur hastid? Khane kheirat ast? Zinde bashi."
Which in Dari, the Afghan dialect of Persian, means, "Peace be with you. How are you? Is your soul healthy? Are you well? Are you well? Are you healthy? Are you fine? Is your household flourishing? Long life to you." Or: "Hello. — Rory Stewart

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. — Rory Stewart

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. — Rory Stewart

Man's life is brief and transitory, Literature endures forever — Rory Stewart

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. — Rory Stewart

I wondered if walking was not a form of dancing. — Rory Stewart

Politics feels, on what I have seen of it, like joining a tribe, and a lot of it is about unspoken ways of behaving. — Rory Stewart

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. — Rory Stewart

It was a bit of a surprise when I became a Tory MP. My friends said it was a stupid idea. — Rory Stewart

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. — Rory Stewart

As we walked past a quad bike chained to a farm gate, he remarked "It's such a pity how times have changed. You can't leave a piece of machinery out on the road any more." He seemed to have forgotten that he had just been describing a time when you couldn't leave you cattle out. — Rory Stewart

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. — Rory Stewart

I recited and followed this song-of-the-places-in-between as a map. — Rory Stewart

In some sense, I'm a romantic. I like the idea of organic history and tradition. — Rory Stewart