Paddy Ashdown

“I will eat my hat if the exit poll is right.”

“For me, the essence of a liberal society is not just an obsession with individual liberty, but also a belief in the power of community.”

“Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”

“There has never been a time in our history when we have been so seduced by the temporary and the trivial.”

“You cannot build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery.”

“We have to be a nation that's confident about our future, that's not constantly looking over its shoulder to the past.”