Paddy Ashdown Quotes

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.

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?

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

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.

Truth and reconciliation' are always combined, but I would split them: I don't think Bosnia is ready for reconciliation, but I do think it is ready for truth.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Politics is compromise.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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