Rory Stewart

“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.”

“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.”

“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.'”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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 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.”

“Being a backbench MP is a bit of an anti-climax for a superhero.”

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

“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 did stuff for three years in Kabul that I found exciting, and a lot of that was fixing roofs, talking about sewage installation.”

“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 want to 'normalise' myself. I would love to have a family.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”