A biography for Nick Clegghasn’t been written yet.
“Reason, in the end, will win against unreason.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“We need to reach out to small 'l' liberal voters who have a modern outlook on life, who want a party that is hard-headed on the economy - more credible on the economy than Labour - but more socially progressive and fairer than the Conservatives.”
“My head spins. One moment I'm told I'm too edgy, then people say I'm too angry, then that I show too much passion... make your minds up.”
“Any government, of whatever composition, needs to mobilise opinion way beyond its own ranks in order to do the difficult things that it does.”
“Politics is a highly tribal business.”
“Liberalism is a really old British tradition and it has a completely different attitude towards the individual and the relationship between the individual and the state than the collectivist response of Labour, and particularly Old Labour, does.”
“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.”
“I don't lead a particularly Bohemian existence. The main criterion for me is not to be judgemental of other people so long as what they do is not harmful or offensive to others.”
“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.”
“One thing I have frankly decided is that when it comes to political reform we have two conservative parties in British politics. Both the Labour and Conservative parties have constantly and repeatedly failed to honour promises they have made about reforming, cleaning, modernising our clapped-out system.”
“Although I am a young leader, I actually came to it strangely quite late. I have a different perspective, partly because of my family, partly because of what I did for ten years: negotiating trade deals, working out in Central Asia doing assistance projects.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”