Quotes By Nick Clegg
You have a political and media elite who have an idiom by which they describe politics. It's highly, highly polarised. It's right, left, red, blue, up, down, victorious, crushed.
Nick Clegg
I totally accept that it's a legitimate criticism that when you are involved in the day-to-day scrum of government... that what can get lost is the narrative, the hymn sheet... the song that inspires and lifts people's sights.
Nick Clegg
If you scratch below the surface and ask what really makes me tick, it's the liberalism of trying to promote freedom and opportunity. Promoting social mobility is one of the keys to that.
Nick Clegg
I think that the days when newspaper barons could basically click their fingers and governments would snap to attention have gone.
Nick Clegg
You've got some very powerful countries: Poland, the United Kingdom, Sweden and others who have a genuine desire to see the euro zone straighten itself out. It's good for all of us, whether you're in the euro zone or not, to make sure that it doesn't lead to a fracturing.
Nick Clegg
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown committed to John Major's spending envelopes in 1997. No-one said that Tony Blair and John Major were identical. This happens quite often that parties actually, despite all the sound and fury, agree on the overall need to make sure that we live within our means as a country.
Nick Clegg
What I hope is in five years' time, I can go to the British people in the election and say: Lots of you doubted that coalition politics worked, but it has worked.
Nick Clegg
I will not accept a new wave of fiscal retrenchment, of belt-tightening, without asking people at the top to make their contribution, to make an additional contribution. I don't think you can ask people on middle and low incomes, who, after all, are the vast majority of the British population, to bear the brunt of this adjustment.
Nick Clegg
Most of what needs to be changed in the euro zone can be done without treaty changes. The demand for treaty change is as political as it is legal and I don't think it's going to happen soon.
Nick Clegg
I don't even pretend we can occupy the Lib Dem holier-than-thou, hands-entirely-clean-and-entirely-empty-type stance. No, we are getting our hands dirty, and inevitably and totally understandably we are being accused of being just like any other politicians.
Nick Clegg
Any government, of whatever composition, needs to mobilise opinion way beyond its own ranks in order to do the difficult things that it does.
Nick Clegg
The Labour Party has become consumed by collective bile towards... the Liberal Democrats. That portrays a rather nasty arrogance.
Nick Clegg
I say this as a young dad seeing children going into primary school: I don't think we should underestimate the formative effect on a child of those first years in primary school.
Nick Clegg
I am a passionate believer in freedom of speech. I would not support anything which would impinge on aggressive robust freedom of the British press, but when things go wrong and there has been outright illegality, there should be proper accountability.
Nick Clegg
I didn't become leader to transform the Liberal Democrats into an enlarged form of the Electoral Reform Society. It's not the be all and end all for us. There are other very, very key ambitions in politics, not least social mobility and life chances, that I care about as passionately if not more.
Nick Clegg
I've just been away for a week, and I dropped my BlackBerry in the sea while I was messing around with the kids, so no one can reach me. Blissful. I heartily recommend it.
Nick Clegg
When I became leader, I made very clear I was not going to choose the easy life. I have always taken risks. I don't like comfort-zone politics.
Nick Clegg
Most people in this country are very fair-minded; they understand we're in the middle of a very difficult journey of repairing, rescuing, restoring our British economy, and they want us, and they want particularly Liberal Democrats in government, to fight for the fairest possible way of doing that.
Nick Clegg
The caricature of what George Osborne is doing on the fiscal side is absurd. If you read some of the commentary, particularly from the left, you would think he was turning the clock back to the 1930s.
Nick Clegg
We need to teach our kids, because there is such a celebrity culture at the moment, that however rich you are, however famous you are, however glamorous you are, everyone has to live by the same rules.
Nick Clegg
We are keen to stress that a strong euro zone is good for a strong United Kingdom. It's not for us to write the changes that the euro zone needs to embark on.
Nick Clegg
For far too long the world's poorest people have seen no benefit from the vast natural resources in their own backyards. It is time to end the injustice where ordinary people are silent witnesses, left to suffer without basic services, as the profits from their countries' assets are hidden and plundered by corrupt regimes.
Nick Clegg
One of the big changes in politics has been because families, individuals, have felt worried, insecure... worried about the economy, worried about their jobs, worried about their kids' futures... actually the disconnect between the public and media discourse and people's everyday concerns has become bigger not smaller.
Nick Clegg
My dad's side of the family had lots of artists and musicians. There's an emotional, quite sentimental quality to Slavic culture. It's very open, it loves art, it loves music, it loves literature. It's very warm, it's very up, it's very down. I would celebrate that.
Nick Clegg
Grown-up politicians talk to each other across party lines. Over the last few weeks I have had lengthy conversations with Ed Miliband, David Miliband, with Tony Blair, with Peter Mandelson... talking about Europe, talking about political reform.
Nick Clegg