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All Paddy Ashdown Quotes
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
58% of people like this quote
I can establish the expectation of retributive justice. Have we done that? No.
Paddy Ashdown
57% of people like this quote
The greatest failure is that although we have created institutions, we have not created a civil society.
Paddy Ashdown
56% of people like this quote
I can create institutions, but I can't rewrite the chips in people's heads.
Paddy Ashdown
55% of people like this quote
It's not my job to be popular. I'm goal-driven; my job is to get results.
Paddy Ashdown
55% of people like this quote
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
55% of people like this quote
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
54% of people like this quote
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
54% of people like this quote
I am here because I think it was a terrible sin of the west to allow those years of war.
Paddy Ashdown
53% of people like this quote
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
51% of people like this quote
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
51% of people like this quote
It would be a foolish high representative who worked that way.
Paddy Ashdown
51% of people like this quote
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
50% of people like this quote
We have invented a new human right here - the right to return home after a war.
Paddy Ashdown
50% of people like this quote
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