“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 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.”

“I went to watch the Buzkasgu game taking place on a series of fields - some fallow, some plowed and planted- just to the east of the empty Buddha niches. Buzkashi is a form of polo played with a dead goat instead of a ball.”

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

“In the evening [the Iraqi interim governor of Maysan province] asked me for fifty dollars to repair his windows, which had been destroyed in a recent demonstration. Although he was the governor, his salary was only four hundred and fifty dollars a month, and Baghdad had still not agreed to give the governors an independent budget.... For the sake of a tiny sum of money - a couple thousand dollars a month from the hundred billion we had spent on the invasion - we were alienating our key partner and successor. p. 264”

“Man's life is brief and transitory, Literature endures forever”

“Unlike most travel writers, he [Babur] is honest.”