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 m… - Pete Buttigieg

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.

The problem is that they're telling us to look for greatness in all the wrong places. Because if there's one thing that the city of South Bend has shown, it's that there's no such thing as an honest politics that revolves around the word "Again". It is time to walk away from the politics from the politics of the past and towards something totally different. So that's why I'm here today. I'm here to join you to make a little news. My name is Pete Buttigieg. They call me Mayor Pete. I am a proud son of South Bend, Indiana, and I am running for President of the United States.

"It had been on my mind ever since allowing myself to call President Trump a "draft-dodging chickenhawk" during one of the DNC forums. While true, that statement was not in keeping with 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 failed to call us to our highest values."