Paddy Ashdown
Paddy Ashdown
Jeremy John Durham Ashdown, Baron Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon, GCMG, CH, KBE, PC, usually known as Paddy Ashdown, is a British politician and former diplomat who served as Leader of the Liberal Democrats from 1988 until August 1999...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth27 February 1941
allow terrible war
I am here because I think it was a terrible sin of the west to allow those years of war.
institutions civil-society
The greatest failure is that although we have created institutions, we have not created a civil society.
people titles prejudice
There can be no place in a 21st-century parliament for people with 15th-century titles upholding 19th-century prejudices.
people institutions chips
I can create institutions, but I can't rewrite the chips in people's heads.
anger years skins
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.
said bosnians british
I've had much nastier things said about me in the British press than in the Bosnian press.
grace states
Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace.
people want politician
People do not want politicians they know to be corrupt.
political alternatives substance
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.
people britain blair
Blair is regarded by most people in Britain as a smarmy git.
trying produce sells
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.
compromise
Politics is compromise.
destiny israel east
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.
stupid way would-be
It would be a foolish high representative who worked that way.