Rory Stewart > Quotes

“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 Places in Between

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

“Religions . . . seem to avoid mountain passes.”
― Rory Stewart, The Places in Between

“Man's life is brief and transitory, Literature endures forever”
― Rory Stewart, The Places in Between

“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, The Places in Between

“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, The Places in Between

“I wondered if walking was not a form of dancing.”
― Rory Stewart, The Places in Between

“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, The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq

“My feet beat out a steady muffled rhythm. My thoughts participated in each step, never getting ahead of me.”
― Rory Stewart, The Places in Between

“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

“Genghis Khan's 'arrow messengers' could travel 450 kilometers a day.”
― Rory Stewart, The Places in Between

“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, The Places in Between

“Unlike most travel writers, he [Babur] is honest.”
― Rory Stewart, The Places in Between

“Everyone had memorized a chant of names and villages along footpaths in every direction. This was a very useful map.”
― Rory Stewart, The Places in Between

“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

“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.”
― Rory Stewart, The Places in Between

“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”
― Rory Stewart, Politics On the Edge: A Memoir From Within

“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.”
― 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, The Places in Between

“Back in London, Liz Truss asked me how my weekend had been. I explained that my father had died. She paused for a moment, nodded and asked when the twenty-five-year environment plan would be ready”
― Rory Stewart, Politics On the Edge: A Memoir From Within

“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.”
― Rory Stewart, Politics On the Edge: A Memoir From Within

“I recited and followed this song-of-the-places-in-between as a map.”
― Rory Stewart, The Places in Between

“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.”
― Rory Stewart, The Places in Between

“Brexit: ‘The NHS will be stronger, class sizes will be smaller, taxes lower … wages will be higher, fuel bills will be lower.”
― Rory Stewart, Politics On the Edge: A Memoir From Within

“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.”
― Rory Stewart, The Places in Between

“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, The Marches: A Borderland Journey Between England and Scotland

“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.”
― Rory Stewart, The Places in Between

“consensus as an establishment conspiracy, deny the complexity of society and economy, and misrepresent what Britain shared, or what it could realistically be. He”
― Rory Stewart, Politics On the Edge: A Memoir From Within

“Our air pollution was breaching EU standards. She unrolled a map of air pollution across Britain. I looked at the red halo around Leeds.”
― Rory Stewart, Politics On the Edge: A Memoir From Within

“There is a consensus in Afghan society: violence must end, respect for human rights will form the path to a lasting peace and stability across the country. The people’s aspirations must be represented in an accountable, broad-based, gender sensitive, multi-ethnic, representative government that delivers daily value.67”
― Rory Stewart, The Places in Between