Best 24 quotes of Paddy Ashdown on MyQuotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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