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.
Paddy Ashdown

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

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

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

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

I don't think Bosnia is ready for reconciliation, but I do think it is ready for truth.
Paddy Ashdown

I love this country, I love these people, though I can't say I love their politicians. People are always nicer than politicians, but here, you can mark that difference up a hundredfold.
Paddy Ashdown

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

People do not want politicians they know to be corrupt.
Paddy Ashdown

Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace.
Paddy Ashdown

Politics is compromise.
Paddy Ashdown

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

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