Rory Stewart Quotes

Our country is being bled daily in an effort to create a democracy in a place where it never existed.

The savants will write excellent volumes. There will be laureates. But wars will continue just the same until the forces of the circumstances render them impossible.

You have to be strong; you have to trust yourself that you can bring down the dictatorship regime and build a new country. You have to be part of building your country. We know that anything that you dream can happen. You have to know that you have the ability to achieve your dream.

The human species is now at a point where it has to make choices that are going to determine whether decent survival is even possible. Environmental catastrophe, including war, maybe pandemics, these are very serious issues and they can't be addressed within the current structure of institutions. That's almost given. There have to be real significant changes, and only really effective popular mass-based movements can introduce and carry forward such initiatives, as indeed did happen during the 1930s.

It's important to begin to even consider whether countries can become something that looks very different because people tend to take their countries for granted.

We're in the middle of the transformation of a society that has handled its politics through repression to a society that will handle its politics through democratic institutions.

I'm fighting for real change, not just partisan change where everybody else gets rich but you. I'm fighting all of us across the country are fighting for peaceful regime change in our own country. The media donor political complex that's bled this country dry has to be replaced with a new government of, by, and for the people.

The mistakes of the Iraq war are not only tactical and strategic, but historical. It is essentially a war of colonialism, attempted in the post-colonial age.

President Bush said it's now time for a change in Iraq and he wants them to have a Western-style democracy like ours. So right now in Iraq, the economy is collapsing, businessmen are corrupt, and Hussein wants his son to take over as president. Sounds like mission accomplished.

As you're building a country, you have to be thinking about what works at the ground level. And women have their fingers on the pulse of the community. They know what is critical to have in the treaty to stop the war.

Through my time in the military and my deployments, I have recognized the importance of having a Commander in Chief who will not only go after those who threaten the safety and security of the American people, but who will also exercise good judgment and foresight in stopping these failed interventionist wars of regime change that have cost our country so much in human lives, untold suffering, and trillions of dollars.

We should be more modest in our belief that we can impose democracy on a country through military force.

I'm an old guy, and I was protesting during the Vietnam War. We killed fifty Asians for every loyal American. Every artist worth a damn in this country was terribly opposed to that war, finally, when it became evident what a fiasco and meaningless butchery it was. We formed sort of a laser beam of protest. Every painter, every writer, every stand-up comedian, every composer, every novelist, every poet aimed in the same direction. Afterwards, the power of this incredible new weapon dissipated.

Like a lot of people, I had this naive hope that Barack Obama would fix everything quickly. You know, the culture of celebrity in this country leads us away from democratic ways of thinking and into this hero worship. And so of course, one man cannot swoop in and fix everything on his own. It's much more complicated and difficult than that, and progressives in this country since then have had to come to terms with the fact that we need to do more than actually get out of our house and vote. It's an ongoing process to turn the tide.

An end to wars, peace among the nations, the cessation of pillaging and violence - such is our ideal, but only bourgeois sophists can seduce the masses with this ideal, if the latter is divorced from a direct and immediate call for revolutionary action.

I can think of few important movements for reform in which success was won by any method other than that of an energetic minority presenting the indifferent majority with a fait accompli, which was then accepted.

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness — and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling — their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

If democracy succeeds in Egypt, other countries will follow. Should the democratic experiment in Egypt be hijacked by the military or anti-democratic Islamist groups, the revolution will fail elsewhere.

The 21st Century should be India's century but from 2004 to 2014 bad ideas and bad actions have affected the country adversely. Every day was a new bad day and there were new scandals. People were furious.

It was about the compelling need to make countries get along to prevent war, in contrast with the totally petty and selfish bullshit that drives the individuals who are supposedly in charge of these countries. It's hard to believe that these self-centered people have nuclear weapons that they can fire at any moment.

During the Vietnam War, which lasted longer than any war we've ever been in - and which we lost - every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.

It takes a long time to turn a big country around. Just be of good cheer and keep working on it.

The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change.

The only tool we have to fix the problems of this country - the democratic process - is itself broken. Which is why nothing will fundamentally change until we solve the problem of money in politics.

You never know," Jack said speculatively. "There may come a time when savages like William Hamleigh aren't in power; when the laws protect the ordinary people instead of enslaving them; when the king makes peace instead of war. Think of that - a time when towns in England don't need walls!