Guess quote

Paddy Ashdown [1941-0] British

Rank: 102
Politician, Former High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina

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.

Anger, Failure, War

Quote	Tags	Rank
I don't think Bosnia is ready for reconciliation, but I do think it is ready for truth.		101
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.	War	102
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.		103
The greatest failure is that although we have created institutions, we have not created a civil society.	Failure	104
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.	Anger	105
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.		106
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.		107
I am here because I think it was a terrible sin of the west to allow those years of war.		108
I can create institutions, but I can't rewrite the chips in people's heads.		109
I can establish the expectation of retributive justice. Have we done that? No.		110
I was told there would be riots in the streets, but there were no riots.		111
I've had much nastier things said about me in the British press than in the Bosnian press.		112
It would be a foolish high representative who worked that way.		113
It's not my job to be popular. I'm goal-driven; my job is to get results.		114
People do not want politicians they know to be corrupt.		115
Politics is compromise.		116
We have invented a new human right here - the right to return home after a war.		117
What my future will not be is active politics in the Liberal Democrat party.		118
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.		119
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.		120
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?		121
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.		122
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.		123
Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace.		124

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