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" I'm not good at explaining why I walked across Afghanistan. "

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" 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. "

" If we say the purpose of life is our children, that's neither a purpose nor a meaning. But I'm sure I will be as besotted as everybody else when I have them. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I am from Scotland, and I am Christian, not Muslim. "

" When my father was posted to Malaysia, we'd take bacon-and-egg sandwiches in our backpacks and go hiking in the jungle or make bamboo rafts to sail down rivers. "

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" 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.' "

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" 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. "

" September 11th has produced only miniature heroes because our culture has freed itself from many of the old, dangerous, elitist fantasies of heroism... But in so doing, we have not only tamed and diminished heroes. We have risked taming and diminishing ourselves. "

" 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. "

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" Politics feels, on what I have seen of it, like joining a tribe, and a lot of it is about unspoken ways of behaving. "

" The politicians think the journalists have power, the journalists think bankers have power, bankers think lawyers have power. The truth is, nobody has power. "