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" 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
Time
Politics
People
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" I think that the days when newspaper barons could basically click their fingers and governments would snap to attention have gone. "
Nick Clegg
Gone
Days
Attention
" 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
Politics
Blue
Media
" The Conservative Party is not honouring the commitment to Lords reform and, as a result, part of our contract has now been broken. Clearly I cannot permit a situation where Conservative rebels can pick and choose the parts of the contract they like, while Liberal Democrat MPs are bound to the entire agreement. "
Nick Clegg
Result
Broken
Commitment
" 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. "
Nick Clegg
Political
Promises
Politics
" 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
Rich
Moment
Live
" 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
Existence
Long
Me
" 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
Doing
Family
I Am
" 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
Freedom
You
Trying
" 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
Great
Moment
Book
" The Labour Party has become consumed by collective bile towards... the Liberal Democrats. That portrays a rather nasty arrogance. "
Nick Clegg
Democrats
Arrogance
Party
" 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
Penny
Three
Tax
" 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
Think
Back
Clock
" The British political system and the whole clapped out Westminster architecture, and the language that we use about politics, it's completely unsustainable. You either decide to be part of that transition to do something different. Or you cling to old certainties. "
Nick Clegg
Politics
Architecture
You
" What we should be doing in the EU as a whole is more economic integration in the single market, rather than less. "
Nick Clegg
Economic
Market
More
" 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
Become
Media
Changes
" 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
Difficult
Own
Opinion
" 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
Culture
Music
Quality
" 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
Political
Party
Talking
" 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
Government
Lost
Get
" 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
People
Door
Focus
" 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
Journey
People
Fight
" 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
Reach
Week
Away
" 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
Politics
End
Leader
" I am quite strict as a dad but I don't want to be censorious. "
Nick Clegg
I Am
Want
Strict
" 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
Government
Liberal
Democrats
" 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
Student
People
Dream
" 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
Good
Changes
Stress
" 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
Think
Child
Children
" 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
Live
Within
Sound
" 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
Risks
Easy
Leader