Rory Stewart Quotes

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

Religions . . . seem to avoid mountain passes.

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

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 wondered if walking was not a form of dancing.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Brexit: ‘The NHS will be stronger, class sizes will be smaller, taxes lower … wages will be higher, fuel bills will be lower.

Here, the ancient English sense of journey, ‘a day’s travel’ (French journée), 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 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.

Perhaps it is because no one requires more than a charming illusion of action in the developing world. If policy makers know little about Afghanistan, the public knows even less, and few care about policy failure when the effects are felt only in Afghanistan.

Bush, it will go down in history, it’s unbelievable that guy was president. Unbelievable. I’m sure, I’m 100 percent sure, in one hundred years, in one thousand years if society’s still standing, they’re going to say, “That guy was president? Like, what?” I know that to be a fact. RORY

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.

Proper searching could stop drugs being carried through the gates. In the US and Sweden, where there was proper searching, I had discovered, the drug rates were far lower. But when I shared these suggestions with the ministry drugs team, they were wearily dismissive. 'If you stop drugs coming in one way they will come in another' they said. One said 'You don't want to be like your predecessors, fantasising about how to stop drugs coming in on drones.' My predecessor, it seemed, had suggested flying eagles at the drones.' Liz Truss had stood at the dispatch box and said 'I was at HMP Pentonville last week. They've got patrol dogs who are barking to deter drones.' This, I was told provoked an MP to shoat 'You are barking

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.

Johnson is after all the most accomplished liar in public life – perhaps the best liar ever to serve as prime minister. Some of this may have been a natural talent – but a lifetime of practice and study has allowed him to uncover new possibilities which go well beyond all the classifications of dishonesty attempted by classical theorists like St Augustine. He has mastered the use of error, omission, exaggeration, diminution, equivocation and flat denial. He has perfected casuistry, circumlocution, false equivalence and false analogy. He is equally adept at the ironic jest, the fib and the grand lie; the weasel word and the half-truth; the hyperbolic lie, the obvious lie, and the bullshit lie – which may inadvertently be true. And because he has been so famous for this skill for so long, he can use his reputation to ascend to new levels of playful paradox. Thus he could say to me “Rory, don’t believe anything I am about to say, but I would like you to be in my cabinet” – and still have me laugh in admiration.

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 on the long marches out of Africa.

In India, when I was walking from one pilgrimage site to another across the Himalayas, I carried the Bhagavad Gita open in my left hand and read one line at a time.

We felt like a book club going to a Millwall game.

consensus as an establishment conspiracy, deny the complexity of society and economy, and misrepresent what Britain shared, or what it could realistically be. He

I told him that Afghanistan was the missing section of my walk, the place in between the deserts and the Himalayas, between Persian, Hellenic and Hindu culture, between Islam and Buddhism, between mystical and militant Islam. I wanted to see where these cultures merged into one another or touched the global world.

given a choice between discretion and honesty, I have chosen the latter.

What you say, what you always say, is that you want to make a difference. People want to hear you say that you are in it for them.

Man’s life is brief and transitory, Literature endures forever.

Britain was now, perhaps had always been, a place in hectic motion. A country that we were told had closed its industries and gone big into banking. A place that was now gambling on a new existence outside the European Union, and a closer relationship with China, at a time when the old political orders seemed ever more fragile, and energy security and food security ever less secure. An economy 80 per cent based on elusive intangible services; buoyed by an improbable housing bubble, and entirely dependent for its health and care on immigrants, whom citizens seemed to wish to exclude.

Our air pollution was breaching EU standards. She unrolled a map of air pollution across Britain. I looked at the red halo around Leeds.

I told him I had hoped to understand the Hazara but had only gathered disconnected and puzzling anecdotes. I asked what could explain the Hazara to me. He smiled and put clean blankets on the floor. And when I lay down he removed a bundle from a carved wooden box, kissed it, said a prayer, unwrapped it, and, opening the Koran, read: "And what can explain the steep path to you? It is the freeing of a slave, Or the giving of food in a day of starvation..." And as I lay wondering who he was, he continued gently: "Unbeliever, I do not worship what you worship, Nor do you worship what I worship. I shall never worship what you worship, Nor will you ever worship what I worship. You have your religion and I have mine.

He [Babur] was a ype 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.

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

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.

Liz Truss had stood at the despatch box and said, ‘I was at HMP Pentonville last week. They’ve now got patrol dogs who are barking which helps to deter drones.’ This, I was told, provoked an MP to shout ‘You are barking.