Paddy Ashdown Quotes

• There can be no place in a 21st-century parliament for people with15th-century titles upholding19th-century prejudices.

  Paddy Ashdown

  Topics in Uncategorized

• I have learnt from bitter experience that when the armchair theorists and the Whitehall generals start talking of a surgical war, it is time to run for cover.

  Paddy Ashdown

  Topics in Uncategorized

• The ringmaster has altered, but the circus remains the same.

  Paddy Ashdown

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Neil Kinnock has travelled the road to Damascus so often, I hear that he has decided to buy himself a season ticket.

  Paddy Ashdown

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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

  Topics in Experience, Work

  Tags in Magnitude

• 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

  Topics in Power

  Tags in Create

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Attention, Maybe

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

  Paddy Ashdown

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Think, War

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

  Paddy Ashdown

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in British

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

  Paddy Ashdown

  Topics in Education

  Tags in People

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

  Paddy Ashdown

  Topics in Justice

  Tags in Expectation

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

  Paddy Ashdown

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Riot

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

  Paddy Ashdown

  Topics in Truth

  Tags in Think

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

  Paddy Ashdown

  Topics in Job

  Tags in Result

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Generous, Way

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

  Paddy Ashdown

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Foolish

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

  Paddy Ashdown

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Human Rights, War

• Politics is compromise.

  Paddy Ashdown

  Topics in Politics

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Property, Livelihoods

• 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

  Topics in Future

Paddy Ashdown (27)

Birth:	27th February, 1941
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Diplomat, Politician, Soldier

About

Paddy Ashdown is a British politician and diplomat. He is the Chair of the Liberal Democrats 2015 General Election Team. After service as a Royal Marine and as an intelligence officer for the UK security services, Lord Ashdown was a Member of Parliament for Yeovil from 1983 to 2001, and leader of the Liberal Democrats from 1988 until August 1999; later he was the international High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina from 27 May 2002 to 30 May 2006, following his vigorous lobbying for military action against Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

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