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
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.
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.
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.
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 am from Scotland, and I am Christian, not Muslim.
Politics feels, on what I have seen of it, like joining a tribe, and a lot of it is about unspoken ways of behaving.
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.
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.
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.
I had a lot of romantic notions about what it would mean to cross Asia by foot.
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.'
The politicians think the journalists have power, the journalists think bankers have power, bankers think lawyers have power. The truth is, nobody has power.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not good at explaining why I walked across Afghanistan.
I want to 'normalise' myself. I would love to have a family.
In some sense, I'm a romantic. I like the idea of organic history and tradition.
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.
Being a backbench MP is a bit of an anti-climax for a superhero.
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 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.
It was a bit of a surprise when I became a Tory MP. My friends said it was a stupid idea.
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 did stuff for three years in Kabul that I found exciting, and a lot of that was fixing roofs, talking about sewage installation.
I like connecting to places by foot, and I'm interested in experiencing how somewhere like Crieff connects to somewhere like London.
The thing that interests me most about Scotland is how we differ from our neighbours. How do our ambitions differ? What kind of society are we? What can we learn from the mistakes of the past, and how do we position ourselves in the world?
