Words matter. These are the best Rory Stewart Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The politicians think the journalists have power, the journalists think bankers have power, bankers think lawyers have power. The truth is, nobody has power.
Being a backbench MP is a bit of an anti-climax for a superhero.
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 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.
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.
I like connecting to places by foot, and I’m interested in experiencing how somewhere like Crieff connects to somewhere like London.
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 had a lot of romantic notions about what it would mean to cross Asia by foot.
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.
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.
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.
I’m not good at explaining why I walked across Afghanistan.
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.
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.
I did stuff for three years in Kabul that I found exciting, and a lot of that was fixing roofs, talking about sewage installation.
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.
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 am from Scotland, and I am Christian, not Muslim.
