Voters tell politicians what they want through the ballot box. Constantly second-guessing them by speculating whether the parties should gang up on each other misses the point. – Nick Clegg
With the EU taking in ten more countries and adopting a new Constitution, organisations need more than ever intelligent professional help in engaging with the EU institutions. – 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
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
If the euro zone doesn’t come up with a comprehensive vision of its own future, you’ll have a whole range of nationalist, xenophobic and extreme movements increasing across the European Union. And, frankly, questions about the British debate on EU membership will just be a small sideshow compared to the rise of political populism. – Nick Clegg
I don’t watch a huge amount of telly. I read a lot. I’m reading at the moment ‘Freedom,’ by Jonathan Franzen, a great big brick of a book, and I’m loving it. – Nick Clegg
Liberal Democrats in government will not follow the last Labour government by sounding the retreat on the protection of civil liberties in the United Kingdom. It continues to be essential that our civil liberties are safeguarded, and that the state is not given the powers to snoop on its citizens at will. – Nick Clegg
I wish more people knew that the only one of the three main parties where not a single MP flipped from one property to the next, and not a single MP avoided capital-gains tax, where every single London MP did not claim a penny of second-home allowance, was the Liberal Democrats. – 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
Our Sheffield and London homes are worth well over a million but the bank owns most of them – we are mortgaged up to the gills. – Nick Clegg
Do I get up every morning and ask: am I doing the things that I believe in and am I doing them for the best possible motives? Yes. Unambiguously yes. – Nick Clegg
We can’t return to the 19th century, draw up our drawbridges and say, we don’t have anything to do with each other, Germany will not work with the Netherlands, the UK will not work with France. That’s ludicrous. We are condemned to work with each other. – 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
I think that the days when newspaper barons could basically click their fingers and governments would snap to attention have gone. – Nick Clegg
If there’s one thing I’m not going to apologise for as the leader of the Liberal Democrats in government after 60 or 70 years of being out of government, it’s that you just cannot avoid but deal with the world the way it is. – 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
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
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 don’t want to clip on the armour every morning. I’ve seen some politicians do this and they get a bit mangled and bitter. I just refuse to do that. I refuse to be angry or bitter or complain, and I remain open. I may sometimes be a bit too open but I’m not going to change that one bit. – 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
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
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
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
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
We have got to make sure there is proper independent scrutiny and accountability for people in the press, just as there should be in any other industry where things go wrong. But let’s not try and think it is for politicians or governments to tell people what they stick in newspapers. That is deeply illiberal. – Nick Clegg
One thing I’ve very quickly learned is that if you wake up every morning worrying about what’s in the press, you would go completely and utterly potty. – Nick Clegg
The UK is not going to leave the European Union. Of course not. We are inextricably wound up with Europe. In terms of culture, history and geography, we are a European nation. – Nick Clegg