Paddy Ashdown Quotes

#1. I love this country, I love these people, though I can't say I love their politicians. People are always nicer than politicians, but here, you can mark that difference up a hundredfold.

Paddy Ashdown

#2. We have invented a new human right here - the right to return home after a war.

Paddy Ashdown

#3. The United States will remain the most powerful nation on Earth for the next 10, 15 years, but the context in which she holds her power has now radically altered.

Paddy Ashdown

#4. One of the great barriers to peace in the Middle East is that both sides, both Israel and the Palestinians, do not understand that they share a collective destiny.

Paddy Ashdown

#5. Bosnia is under my skin. It's the place you cannot leave behind. I was obsessed by the nightmare of it all; there was this sense of guilt, and an anger that has become something much deeper over these last years.

Paddy Ashdown

#6. We have to make their livelihoods viable, get them the proper prices for their produce, try and make them stay rather than sell their property and leave again.

Paddy Ashdown

#7. It works both ways: there are victims of tragedy who come to me who have experienced grief of such magnitude that they cannot reconcile. Likewise, I cannot change the mentality of those who committed the crimes or the fools who followed them.

Paddy Ashdown

#8. The greatest failure is that although we have created institutions, we have not created a civil society.

Paddy Ashdown

#9. I don't think Bosnia is ready for reconciliation, but I do think it is ready for truth.

Paddy Ashdown

#10. Politics is compromise.

Paddy Ashdown

#11. My second job has been to try to use my power to create institutions of a modern state that could enter the European Union, and there was very little time. The door was closing, and I wanted to get Bosnia through before it shut.

Paddy Ashdown

#12. I am formally accountable to the steering board of the PIC, and I meet with nine ambassadors from the PIC every week. I have to have the capitals' broad agreement with what I do.

Paddy Ashdown

#13. I've had much nastier things said about me in the British press than in the Bosnian press.

Paddy Ashdown

#14. It's not my job to be popular. I'm goal-driven; my job is to get results.

Paddy Ashdown

#15. There can be no place in a 21st-century parliament for people with 15th-century titles upholding 19th-century prejudices.

Paddy Ashdown

#16. In the modern age where everything is connected to everything, the most important thing about what you can do is what you can do with others.

Paddy Ashdown

#17. The multinational corporations now developing budgets often bigger than medium-sized countries - these live in a global space which is largely unregulated, not subject to the rule of law, and in which people may act free of constraint.

Paddy Ashdown

#18. What my future will not be is active politics in the Liberal Democrat party.

Paddy Ashdown

#19. Now we are intimately locked together. You get swine flu in Mexico; it's a problem for Charles de Gaulle Airport 24 hours later. Lehman Brothers goes down; the whole lot collapses. There are fires in the steppes of Russia; food riots in Africa.

Paddy Ashdown

#20. I can create institutions, but I can't rewrite the chips in people's heads.

Paddy Ashdown

#21. I can establish the expectation of retributive justice. Have we done that? No.

Paddy Ashdown

#22. History teaches us these lessons for the interveners: leave your prejudices at home, keep your ambitions low, have enough resources to do the job, do not lose the golden hour, make security your first priority, involve the neighbours.

Paddy Ashdown

#23. Coalition will come sooner or later, I'm certain of that.

Paddy Ashdown

#24. People do not want politicians they know to be corrupt.

Paddy Ashdown

#25. At the next election he'll offer the British public an alternative that provides weight and substance and seriousness in a political debate that is, frankly, increasingly obsessed with modishness and flim-flam.

Paddy Ashdown

#26. Blair is regarded by most people in Britain as a smarmy git.

Paddy Ashdown

#27. It was a superb agreement to end a war, but a very bad agreement to make a state. From now on, we have to part company with Dayton and try to build a modern democratic state, for which I have tried to lay the foundations.

Paddy Ashdown

#28. We who came here saw what was happening. This was far more than a war in a faraway place. This was a moral imperative, a terrible vision of the future.

Paddy Ashdown

#29. The advent of interconnectedness and of weapons of mass destruction means that, increasingly, I share a destiny with my enemy.

Paddy Ashdown

#30. The generous way of putting it is that we were not ready for this. The less generous way is to say: How was it possible to return to the politics of appeasement of the 1930s?

Paddy Ashdown

#31. I was told there would be riots in the streets, but there were no riots.

Paddy Ashdown

#32. Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace.

Paddy Ashdown

#33. Maybe it's legitimate criticism, though it can be hurtful. Maybe I haven't paid sufficient attention to the people with whom I would have a natural affinity as a liberal, and they feel let down by that.

Paddy Ashdown

#34. It would be a foolish high representative who worked that way.

Paddy Ashdown

#35. I am here because I think it was a terrible sin of the west to allow those years of war.

Paddy Ashdown