Paddy Ashdown Quotes

“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.”

“Politics is compromise.”

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

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

“Oh sod me, Sir, not another bloody Paddy. Even a Brummie is better than another Paddy.”

“We'd never seen anything as green as these rice paddies. It was not just the paddies themselves: the surrounding vegetation - foliage so dense the trees lost track of whose leaves were whose - was a rainbow coalition of one colour: green. There was an infinity of greens, rendered all the greener by splashes of red hibiscus and the herons floating past, so white and big it seemed as if sheets hung out to dry had suddenly taken wing. All other colours - even purple and black - were shades of green. Light and shade were degrees of green. Greenness, here, was less a colour than a colonising impulse. Everything was either already green - like a snake, bright as a blade of grass, sidling across the footpath - or in the process of becoming so. Statues of the Buddha were mossy, furred with green.”

“Sometimes, when you were thinking about something, trying to understand it, it opened up in your head without you expecting it to, like it was a soft spongy light unfolding, and you understood, it made sense forever…”

“Television is democracy at its ugliest.”

“You British plundered half the world for your own profit. Let's not pass it off as the Age of Enlightenment.”

“You don't send a man to his death because you want a hero.”