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

This idea that failure is not an option: It makes failure invisible, inconceivable and inevitable.

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.

The world isnt one way or another. Things can be changed very, very rapidly by someone with sufficient confidence, sufficient knowledge and sufficient authority.

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.

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.

I'd like to come back to the West eventually. In the end abroad I am always a stranger, active politics in particular is not accessible to me and although people are generous, I can never be on the inside of a culture that relies a great deal on the private space and the family.