Paddy Ashdown Quotations

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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

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

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

People do not want politicians they know to be corrupt.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace.

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

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.

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.

My first job has been to do the best thing for the Bosnian people. Not for the Serbs, the Bosniaks or Croats, but the people as a whole.

I believe that there will be a very substantial, perhaps even a two-thirds majority, for constitutional change and the modernization of our system of government in the next Parliament,

It is not only in Bosnia-Herzegovina that you find politicians trying to raise hoary old ghosts of the past and gruesome specters to drive people into the ballot box to vote for them,

It is my worst experience, my worst trip to the Balkans,

We are not there yet, but I'd be disappointed if in two years' time there was not some movement towards truth as a precursor to reconciliation.

The present Europe is unfinished business unless the Balkans are a part of it,

Bosnia and Herzegovina has done what many said was impossible even a year ago, let alone at the start of my mandate in May 2002. For the country now stands at the gates of Europe, ... This is a truly remarkable achievement for a country as war-torn as Bosnia and Herzegovina was just 10 years ago.

I shall go home now. You have to know when your time is up. I knew that with the Liberal Democrats, and I know that now, in Bosnia.

Ten years after Dayton, that these two primary architects of these appalling crimes should still be free is a failure on all sides.

A very small bunch of corrupt politicians believe that allowing Radovan Karadzic to stay at liberty is more important than this country having a future in NATO and peace for its citizens.

This country is about history, and unless the Serbs in particular come to some understanding of this history, we cannot build a stable state.

It might be done I suppose before I leave but I think that a little unlikely.

callous and irresponsible attempt to misguide voters and exploit the trauma of those who survived or were bereaved by the massacre.

I don't think there is anyone who knows Bosnia-Herzegovina better than him. He is deeply trusted in the country. The international mission is in save hands.

I'd sell my grandmother for a bit of definition.

I am absolutely delighted that the international community has chosen Schwarz-Schilling to be my successor. He knows this country, he loves this country... and I cannot think of nobody better to take on this job.

Politics is compromise.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.