Pete Buttigieg Quotes

But for others, work can only be meaningful if its fundamental purpose is in things that would matter even if no one would pay you to care about them.

Life is short, and we do not have much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel with us; so be quick to love, make haste to be kind, and go in peace to follow the good road of blessing.

It is easier to be cruel, or unfair, to people in groups and in the abstract; harder to do so toward a specific person in your midst,

The possibility of highly visible failure has an exceptional power to propel us to want to succeed, and that power can be harnessed to motivate a team or even a community to do something difficult.

Good policy, like good literature, takes personal lived experience as its starting point. At its best, the practice of politics is about taking steps that support people in daily life—or tearing down obstacles that get in their way. Much of the confusion and complication of ideological battles might be washed away if we held our focus on the lives that will be made better, or worse, by political decisions, rather than on the theoretical elegance of the policies or the character of the politicians themselves.

In the mirror, I make eye contact with an unshaven, bleary-eyed man in his mid-thirties, looking harmless but not thrilled to see me at this hour. I’ll just never be a morning person.

We all want to avoid being harmed—but if the cost of doing so is making the terrorist the thing you care about most, to the exclusion of the other things that matter in your society, then you have handed him exactly the kind of victory that makes terrorism such a frequent and successful tactic.

Politics at its worst is ugly, but politics at its best is magnificent. Because it's not just about policy. It is soulcraft and it is moral.

AN ADVENTURE IS ONLY an inconvenience rightly considered,

To believe that your hopes of election depend on fewer people voting is to have a tragically weak level of trust in the value of your own positions, and your ability to defend them.

When no one’s word is authoritative, any crank is as credible as the next person. It is the irony at the heart of conspiracy thinking: You can’t trust anyone these days, so you may as well place some credence in some stranger who just tweeted something exciting, if unproven. ... When someone whispers, “Trust no one,” they are inevitably also saying, “Trust me.

The truth is our election system is flawed. But it will only be improved if we trust it enough to use it to elect people committed to fixing it.

playing to an audience’s distrust of others, you can more quickly secure their trust in you.

It was part of my job to work well with anyone who could help the city. But Pence’s fanaticism was hard to overlook, knowing how it had impacted me as a mayor—and as a person.

there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.

Common decency can kick in before there is time for prejudice to intervene.

I work for the city.” “All right. Can anyone else do your job?” “Not exactly.” “Are you the mayor?” he asked sarcastically. “Um . . .

To me, the whole episode was about what happens when a public official becomes obsessed with ideology and forgets that the chessboard on which he is playing out his strategy is, to a great many people, their own life story. Good policy, like good literature, takes personal lived experience as its starting point. At its best, the practice of politics is about taking steps that support people in daily life—or tearing down obstacles that get in their way. Much of the confusion and complication of ideological battles might be washed away if we held our focus on the lives that will be made better, or worse, by political decisions, rather than on the theoretical elegance of the policies or the character of the politicians themselves.

At one point I learned that when I'd told them my college coursework in Arabic might make me a good intelligence officer, they had recorded that my minor at Harvard had been in aerobics.

The top priority of the terrorist--even more important than killing you--is to make himself your top priority. This is why protecting ourselves from terrorist violence is not enough to defeat terrorism, especially if we try to achieve safety in ways that elevate the importance of terrorists and wind up publicizing their causes.

Doubt is our product,” said the memo, “since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the best means for establishing a controversy.”2

To love a country, as to love a person, is to love a flawed and exquisite creation, to see what is best in it, to be angry when it is not what it could be, precisely because you have seen glimmers of its greatness.

You don’t always have to take the bait.

It is easier to be cruel, or unfair, to people in groups and in the abstract; harder to do so toward a specific person in your midst, especially if you know them already.

Nothing is more human than to resist loss, which is why cynical politicians can get pretty far by offering up the fantasy that a loss can be reversed rather than overcome the hard way. This is the deepest lie of our recent national politics, the core falsehood encoded in "Make America Great Again." Beneath the impossible promises -- that coal alone will fuel our future, that a big wall can be built around our status quo, that climate change isn't even real -- is the deeper fantasy that time itself can be reversed, all losses restored, and thus no new ways of life required.

If our first response toward anyone who struggles to get onto the right side of history is to denounce him as a bigot, we will force him into a defensive crouch -- or into the arms of the extreme right.

At its best, the practice of politics is about taking steps that support people in daily life—or tearing down obstacles that get in their way. Much of the confusion and complication of ideological battles might be washed away if we held our focus on the lives that will be made better, or worse, by political decisions, rather than on the theoretical elegance of the policies or the character of the politicians themselves.

Rawls became famous for creating a new definition of justice, which boils down to this: a society is fair if it looks like something we would design before knowing how we would come into the world. He imagined a fictional “original position,” the position we would be in if we were told we were about to be born, but were not told about the circumstances we would be born into—how tall or short we would be, or of what race or nationality, or what resources or personal qualities we would have. This vision of justice is often compared to being asked how you would want a cake to be divided if you did not know which piece will be yours: equally, of course.

She described her new treatment with a topical chemotherapy that came in the form of a potent cream that she applied, wearing gloves, to burn off the cancerous areas—then she produced a package of the stuff from the bathroom so I could see how mundane this lifesaving medication looked. I blinked in disbelief as she held up what resembled a tube of toothpaste, and explained that each one cost over two thousand dollars. Or that’s what it would cost, if not for the insurance she had purchased through the health insurance exchanges that had been set up as part of Obamacare. I thought—and spoke—of that moment often, later, as I talked about why health policy was not a theoretical question for our family.

Our ability to trust in institutions and in one another—the ability to trust that we are subject to the same facts, even living in the same reality—is now endangered. A combination of causes has brought us to this point, a crisis of trust that has the potential to be paralyzing.

Of course, we can find cases of heinous situations, people perhaps who deserve to die. I've just never met anybody who deserves to kill.

Yet even now he looked on his days as mayor -- not governor or lieutenant governor or baseball team owner or naval aviator -- as the best job he'd ever had.

As I raised the glass and said, "South Bend is back," the roar of the crowd at once reflected, certified, and caused it to be so.

WE DON’T ACTUALLY WANT TO GO BACK. We just think we do, sometimes, when we feel more alert to losses than to gains.

It’s like changing channels every five minutes between The Wire, Parks and Recreation, and, occasionally, Veep.

the Constitution an attempt to structure the founders’ beliefs on how that trust could be distributed.

For purpose-driven people, this is the conundrum of client-service work: to perform at your best, you must learn how to care about something because you are hired to do

AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America’s Upper Classes from Military Service—and How It Hurts Our Country, Kathy Roth-Douquet and Frank Schaeffer

A river is made drop by drop.

We cannot have a free Government without elections, and if the rebellion could force us to forego or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us.

It had been on my mind ever since allowing myself to call President Trump a "draft-dodging chickenhawk" during on of the DNC forums. While true, that statement was not in keeping which how I publicly speak about political figures, or anyone else, and afterward I reflected that this president was inspiring a loss of decency not just in his supporters but also in those of us who opposed him. It was another way of looking at the moral stakes of politics as it filters through to millions of lives: that we might all be growing into harder and perhaps worse people, as a consequence of political leadership that has failed to call us to our highest values.

When you are connected to an institution with that strong a name, people use it for a shortcut to understanding who you are, and if you’re not careful, you use it as a shortcut too. Taking on the shape of that name itself over time.

We will have to decide which approaches we wish to emulate from abroad, which structures we wish to dismantle from before, which strategies we wish to retrieve from our past, and which institutions we may need to fashion completely anew.

Addressing this question - of how to create or enhance a sense of belonging within as diverse a group as the American electorate or, even more broadly, the American people - is central to our chances of building greater trust in our country.

And there is the note from Sherri that I found in my room while getting ready, rolled up in a 'best son-in-law ever' coffee mug, welcoming me to the family and ending, 'Take care of my baby, he may be on a permanent loan to you but he will always be mine.

Then I would jump on a streetcar, along tram lines since torn out, and let it carry me into the West Side, to step off in a neighborhood and wander into a bakery full of East European delights or a tavern where people were swilling Drewrys beer and speaking the language of the old country.

Ours is not an ethnic identity, but a civic one. This means that for us, even more than for most people around the world, a sense of trust is not just strategically important but existentially meaningful. If the cornerstone of American identity is democracy, the cornerstone of democracy is trust.

It now feels like an odd assurance to have had to make, since the attack happened hundreds of miles away, but that day it seemed as if we all had to check on each other for injury, as if anyone we cared about might have been harmed that morning just by being in the same world where this had happened.

Mayor Pete, people are like, “Wow! He speaks like a gazillion languages. Isn’t he so smart?” And I’m like, “Well, actually, you could go to many places in the world where people speak those gazillion languages, right, and they’re not positioned as smart in the same way.” (4/10/2020 on Vocal Fries podcast)

Korea vets in flannel shirts down from Michigan, accompanied by ruddy grandsons in Under Armour camo jackets, coexist peacefully with Montessori moms navigating strollers between clumps of grandparents eyeing big baskets of apples and small ones of plums. Trucker hats are worn without irony here; the hipsters are welcome but not in charge.

Economists comparing the economic growth of various countries have found a strong positive correlation between GDP growth and measured social trust. The effect even seems to apply when comparing different states in the U.S., with one study finding that a ten percent increase in trust translated to about a half percent increase in per capita income growth and even a positive effect on employment rates.

But I was admittedly frustrated after Iowa. The conspiracies multiplied. Someone noticed that our campaign had purchased software from the same software company that made the flawed app in Iowa—enough to send the Twittersphere into a tailspin. A staff member on my campaign was married to someone who ran a company that invested in the company that made the app—clear evidence! No one really took the trouble to explain what all these tidbits were supposed to amount to, but then, conspiracy thinking is not obliged to answer questions; it merely asks them, insinuating.

This feature of the Constitution was itself an expression of trust: trust in future generations. The founders were flawed men who were also cognizant of their limitations (much more so than some who would come along later, insisting that laws must only be understood according to the exact attitudes of the men who wrote them). They built into the system a way for it to become bigger than their own biases, trusting their successors with the power to improve upon what they had created. Decades after the founding, Jefferson wrote in a letter to a friend: “Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind . . . we might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

you would have matured enough to realize you were the recipient of a kindness, the treatment that is instinctual to a politician who knows that you will be best to work with if you have first been made to feel good about yourself.

No, no, no,” replied Brynjolfsson. “From about the 1930s through about the 1960s, the [top] tax rate averaged about seventy percent. At times it was up at ninety-five percent. And those were actually pretty good years for growth.” Indeed they were. Between 1948 and 1973, real GDP grew 170 percent in the United States and per capita income nearly doubled. During that same period, the revenue collected through that progressive tax code made it possible to build an interstate highway system and fund the space program, while dramatically expanding the social safety net, with new programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, and food stamps. Even with historically high tax rates on the wealthiest Americans, the period of economic expansion came to be viewed as a golden age of capitalism. And with government largely delivering for people in a way they had not seen before, these years were also not coincidentally an age that saw Americans two to three times more likely to express trust in their government than they have in more recent years.

For all white Americans there is an opportunity, and obligation, to examine and change how we have benefited from

all police work, and all of American life, takes place in the shadow of systemic racism, which hurts everyone and everything it touches.

Former presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke took this a step further, proclaiming loudly that “America was founded on white supremacy.” Founded. Pete Buttigieg, another presidential candidate at the time of this writing, has expressed his belief that Thomas Jefferson was unworthy of public admiration.

At its best, the practice of politics is about taking steps that support people in daily life -- or tearing down obstacles that get in their way. Much of the confusion and complication of ideological battles might be washed away if we held our focus on the lives that will be made better, or worse, by political decisions, rather than on the theoretical elegance of the policies or the character of the politicians themselves.

For purpose-driven people, this is the conundrum of client-service work: to perform at your best, you must learn how to care about something because you are hired to do so. For some, this is not a problem at all. A great lawyer or consultant can identify so closely with the client, or so strongly desire to be good at the job, or be so well compensated, that her purposes and interests and those of the client become one. But for others, work can only be meaningful if its fundamental purpose is in things that would matter even if no one would pay you to care about them.

To dial up was like watching a rocket launch: first the top light was on, then the second . . . then came the sound of the modem talking to whatever it was talking to . . . sounding like an Atari game’s parody of birdsong or of a clarinet solo, pinging and ponging as more and more of the little lights came on, blinking and then steady, orange and then green . . . the sound building to a crescendo that recalled the noise of TV static, as machines confided who-knows-what secret binary handshakes between them while I listened. Then came a key change. Then the pitch of the static pulse tweaked, now higher, now lower, and then, gloriously, the final light went to green and I was online, in orbit: cyberspace.

the cornerstone of American identity is democracy, the cornerstone of democracy is trust.

Like rain for the English, snow to a South Bender is worthy of intensive discussion even though, or perhaps because, it is so familiar.

Part of how you can win and deserve to win is to know what’s worth more to you than winning.

The purpose of the presidency is not the glorification of the president. It is the unification of the American people.

You cannot love your country if you hate half the people in it.

It was actually Thomas Jefferson himself who said 'we might as well ask a man to wear the coat that fitted him when he was a boy' as expect future generations to live under what he called 'the regime of their barbarous ancestors.' So even the founders that these kind of dead-hand originalists claim fidelity to understood better than their ideological descendants — today's judicial so-called conservatives — the importance of keeping with the times. And we deserve judges and justices who understand that.

The Constitution is a living document because English is a living language.

They're going to keep focusing on which books to ban, and I'm focused on which bridges to build.

When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a culture war.

Transportation should always connect, never divide.

Infrastructure is the foundation that makes it possible for Americans to thrive and live lives of their choosing.

Knowing that the resulting features of high-quality infrastructure can stand not just as pillars of transportation, but cathedrals of democracy.

The more you know about exclusion, the more you think about belonging. We have a crisis of belonging in this country.

You will never know who is taking their lead from you, who is watching you and deciding that they can be a little braver because you have been brave.

Little cruelties add up. And of course, the worst thing about them is that they can drain, not just the person who was targeted by anything from a mean little tweet to a violent attack - but they also drain something out of someone who was the aggressor.

You can be for liberty, or you can be for banning books. You cannot be for both.

The principles that will guide my campaign are simple enough to fit on a bumper sticker: freedom, security, and democracy.

This idea that we just sort people into baskets of good and evil ignores the central fact of human existence, which is that each of us is a basket of good and evil. The job of politics is to summon the good and beat back the evil.

I think the dialogue has gotten so caught up on where you draw the line that we've gotten away from the fundamental question of who gets to draw the line. And I trust women to draw the line.

On the eve of Super Tuesday, the establishment struck. Despite having raised tens of millions of dollars, and having run campaigns that were still seen in many circles as credible, two of the leading moderate Democrats in the race, Pete Buttigieg and Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar, abruptly canceled their candidacies and endorsed Biden. Both flew to Texas, the most hotly contested of the primary states, to appear with the former vice president. They were joined by another former candidate, Texan Beto O’Rourke, in a highly choreographed show of support. The establishment had succeeded in uniting, in support of Biden, the candidates who had been dividing up the moderate vote. Meanwhile, the liberal and progressive vote continued to be divided between Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren and myself. Despite poor showings in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina, Warren chose to stay in the race. I was closer to her on the issues than any other candidate. But, at a point where her endorsement could have been significant in a number of Super Tuesday states, she chose not to give it. Even

In April 2001, a student group called the Progressive Student Labor Movement took over the offices of the university’s president, demanding a living wage for Harvard janitors and food workers. That spring, a daily diversion on the way to class was to see which national figure—Cornel West or Ted Kennedy one day, John Kerry or Robert Reich another—had turned up in the Yard to encourage the protesters. Striding past the protesters and the politicians addressing them, on my way to a “Pizza and Politics” session with a journalist like Matt Bai or a governor like Howard Dean, I did not guess that the students poised to have the greatest near-term impact were not the social justice warriors at the protests […] but a few mostly apolitical geeks who were quietly at work in Kirkland House

I had a professional background in economic development and was fluent in the language of business - even while having fought and bled politically for organized labor in the auto industry.

No one sits on his mother’s knee and says he hopes one day to become a state treasurer.

Ever since that day, success in politics has meant that people who aspired to public office had to give the illusion of democracy while delivering the reality of oligarchic rule.

Of course, the hypocrisy of Democrat Party leaders who oppose school choice runs deep. Barack Obama, Pete Buttigieg, Beto O’Rourke, Gavin Newsom, J. B. Pritzker, Elizabeth Warren, Nancy Pelosi, and Joe Biden, to name a few, have all either attended private schools, sent one or more of their children to private schools, or both.