Pete Buttigieg Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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

A lot of folks were telling me I was the future while I was really trying to concentrate on the present. They would say all kinds of nice things and then swear up and down that I was their second vote, which was a nice way of saying, ‘I’m not going to vote for you.’

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

I was well into adulthood before I was prepared to acknowledge the simple fact that I am gay. It took years of struggle and growth for me to recognize that it’s just a fact of life, like having brown hair, and part of who I am. Putting something this personal on the pages of a newspaper does not come easy. We Midwesterners are instinctively private to begin with, and I’m not used to viewing this as anyone else’s business. But it’s clear to me that at a moment like this, being more open about it could do some good.

The real challenge for the Democratic Party, and its presidential candidates in particular, is to figure out how to reverse the Right’s stranglehold on our political vocabulary, without adopting the kind of lock-step dogmatic monolithism that empowered the likes of Gingrich. I don’t have a quick solution handy, but I’m pretty sure that if the Dems don’t act fast to reclaim our language, they risk losing the word battle before they realize they’re fighting it.

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.

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.

The economic equivalent of a tornado did go through town. And it's not just in a symbolic way. It's in a physical way. You look at some of these buildings, and it literally looks like a bomb went off or like a natural disaster happened. So, you know, getting past that legacy - and if I don't I'll be in trouble - getting past that legacy is not going to be easy, and it's not going to be obvious.

"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."

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.

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