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

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.

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.

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.