Top 40 Nick Clegg Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

3. “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

4. “David Davis had promised that Britain would be part of a free-trade area ‘almost twice the size of the EU’ within two years of the Brexit vote – a statement outdone in its absurdity only by Mr Davis’ later boast of negotiating a trading area ‘probably ten times the size of the European Union’. Based on GDP, Davis is aiming for something larger than the economies of the entire planet combined.68 So it can’t happen.”

— Nick Clegg

5. “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

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

9. “I need to say this – you shouldn’t trust any government, actually including this one. You should not trust government – full stop. The natural inclination of government is to hoard power and information; to accrue power to itself in the name of the public good.”

— Nick Clegg

10. “I think it is a simple statement of principle that in a democracy you should make your MPs work harder for your vote and try and get at least majority support in their local area, and that in a nutshell is what AV does.”

— Nick Clegg

11. “You see people literally in a different galaxy who are paying extraordinarily low rates of tax.”

— Nick Clegg

12. “I am quite strict as a dad but I don’t want to be censorious.”

— Nick Clegg

13. “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.”

— Nick Clegg

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

19. “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

20. “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.”

— Nick Clegg

21. “The Liberal Democrats will add a heart to a Conservative government and a brain to a Labour one.”

— Nick Clegg

22. “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.”

— Nick Clegg

23. “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

24. “Growth that lasts does not threaten our children’s future. It recognises that our planet is a gift that must be cherished. That tomorrow is our responsibility as much as today.”

— Nick Clegg

25. “The Liberal Democrat Party and the Conservative Party come at things very differently when it comes to Europe. When it comes to political reform, we have a much greater tradition in the Liberal Democrats of social justice and fairness than the Conservatives do.”

— Nick Clegg

26. “I think that the days when newspaper barons could basically click their fingers and governments would snap to attention have gone.”

— Nick Clegg

27. “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

28. “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

29. “What we should be doing in the EU as a whole is more economic integration in the single market, rather than less.”

— Nick Clegg

30. “I’m very lucky. I am one of those people who is able to go home, shut the front door and completely focus on the kids.”

— Nick Clegg

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “Nothing will do more damage to the pro-European movement than giving room to the suspicion that we have something to hide, that we do not have the “cojones” to carry our argument to the people.”

— Nick Clegg

36. “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.”

— Nick Clegg

37. “I have got instincts that, I think, are very much in tune with people’s very keen sense to see something different. I did not dream of being in politics since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. I was not involved in student politics, or not in that partisan way.”

— Nick Clegg

38. “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

39. “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

40. “Politics is a highly tribal business.”

— Nick Clegg

41. “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

42. “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

Featured in: Strong Quotes

43. “Actually, the curious thing is that the more you become a subject of admiration or loathing, the more you’re examined under a microscope, the distance seems to open up between who you really are and the portrayals that people impose on you.”

— Nick Clegg