Pete Buttigieg Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless, and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights, while also promoting equal rights for women. We have to encourage a return to traditional moral values. Most importantly, we have to promote general social concern, and less materialism in young people.

Hope is the consequence of action more than its cause.

On one hand, the right wing is replete with personalities who undermine everything they profess to stand for. Across the aisle, members of a Democratic party, aghast at the hypocrisy of their counterparts’ personalities, seem themselves reluctant to demonstrate any personality at all.

You don’t always have to take the bait.

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.

It's time to stop worrying about what the Republicans will say. It's true that if we embrace a far left agenda, they're going to say we're a bunch of crazy socialists. If we embrace a conservative agenda, you know what they're going to do? They're going to say we're a bunch of crazy socialists. So let's just stand up for the right policy, go out there and defend it.

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.

For those who remember if not mourn an epoch of lost greatness, it may be impossible to accept that there is no return. But for those of us who were raised only among its shards, and who grew up questioning if it was ever as great as advertised, embracing the permanence of change is the only thing that can liberate us to move forward.