Rory Stewart Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. Unlike most travel writers, he [Babur] is honest.

Rory Stewart

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

Rory Stewart

#7. 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

#8. 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

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

Rory Stewart

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. The question shouldn't be what we ought to do, but what we can do.

Rory Stewart

#13. I am from Scotland, and I am Christian, not Muslim.

Rory Stewart

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. It was a bit of a surprise when I became a Tory MP. My friends said it was a stupid idea.

Rory Stewart

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

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

Rory Stewart

#26. In some sense, I'm a romantic. I like the idea of organic history and tradition.

Rory Stewart

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. I had a lot of romantic notions about what it would mean to cross Asia by foot.

Rory Stewart

#30. Man's life is brief and transitory, Literature endures forever

Rory Stewart

#31. Religions . . . seem to avoid mountain passes.

Rory Stewart

#32. I wondered if walking was not a form of dancing.

Rory Stewart

#33. 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

#34. I'm not good at explaining why I walked across Afghanistan.

Rory Stewart

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. Despite the dubious statistics ... democracy is a thing of value for which we should be fighting.

Rory Stewart

#40. Being a backbench MP is a bit of an anti-climax for a superhero.

Rory Stewart

#41. This idea that failure is not an option: It makes failure invisible, inconceivable and inevitable.

Rory Stewart

#42. Genghis Khan's 'arrow messengers' could travel 450 kilometers a day.

Rory Stewart

#43. I want to 'normalise' myself. I would love to have a family.

Rory Stewart

#44. I recited and followed this song-of-the-places-in-between as a map.

Rory Stewart

#45. 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

#46. 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