The point about democracy is ...
More phrases
Effort only fully releases its reward after a person refuses to quit.
Never complain and never explain.
A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.
George S. Patton
Problems are not stop signs, they are guidelines.
Robert Schuller
Never give up, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Quotes from the same author
This idea that failure is not an option: It makes failure invisible, inconceivable and inevitable.
Rory Stewart
I left things out - my motivations, my history, my emotional responses - because I am not good at understanding them or writing about them. I tried and it was generally boring and always unconvincing. Most importantly I wanted to try to place Afghans and Afghanistan in the foreground rather than my own character.
Rory Stewart
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
Religions . . . seem to avoid mountain passes.
Rory Stewart
Change can only come from local citizens and politicians - it cannot be imposed by well-meaning foreigners - not least because a society like Afghanistan or Iraq is suspicious of outsiders and often resistant to change. I am not going to get drawn into the ethics of intervening in other countries. My concern is the practical question. Can you actually achieve change in this way? My guess is we can stop wars sometimes as in the Balkans and topple regimes - but that the other stuff - such as corruption is not within our power to effect and alter.
Rory Stewart
