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.”

“Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace.”

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

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

“We have invented a new human right here - the right to return home after a war.”

“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.”

“I was told there would be riots in the streets, but there were no riots.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“I am here because I think it was a terrible sin of the west to allow those years of 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.”

“Politics is compromise.”

“People do not want politicians they know to be corrupt.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”