Pete Buttigieg

“The Electoral College needs to go, because it's made our society less and less democratic.”

“The greatest nation in the world should not have much to fear from a family, especially children, fleeing violence. More importantly, children fleeing violence ought to have nothing to fear from the greatest country in the world.”

“When people are economically or socially dislocated, they are always more vulnerable to being radicalized.”

“If I'm plowing the snow and filling in potholes, then I'm a good mayor, and if we fail to do that, I'm not. And it's got almost nothing to do with whether, when I come home, it's to a husband or to a wife.”

“What's worse: a president who is very faithful to an ideology that you find extreme, or a president who is very cynical and appears to have no ideology at all? Neither one of those things is great.”

“My marriage to Chasten has made me a better man.”

“I kept up top grades, and by senior year, a flow of mailed college recruiting brochures accumulated into an avalanche on our dining room table.”

“The most moving responses I got to my coming out in the first place was people, like teenagers, letting me know that it made their lives easier in some way.”

“As we see dislocation and disruption in certain parts of the country, from rural areas to my home in the industrial Midwest, and in the economy, this leads to a kind of disorientation and loss of community and identity. That void can be filled through constructive and positive things, like community involvement or family.”

“By the way, conversely, one thing I've learned in my career, beginning when I ran for mayor, is that a lot of older voters are among the most excited about a younger candidate. So, you know, I think somebody of any age can deliver a compelling message.”

“The old line of thought used to be that local government is the bush leagues.”

“Systemic racism is something that diminishes all of us. Of course its worst effects are for its victims, but our entire country is held back through the inequality and the mistrust that it creates.”

“Mayors love lists when they say something good about their city and hate them when they don't.”

“As Democrats and progressives look to the future, we should remember our most essential values.”

“We've got to find a way to use our identities to reach other people.”

“I'm not sure anything makes you an outright good person or bad person - that we're all capable of doing good or bad things. And if you want to know how much good you can do, and how much hurt you can do, just ask somebody you love.”

“People in communities like Granger, Indiana, are rarely heard from on cable networks. But they, too, believe it is wrong to deport friends and neighbors who do no harm and much good.”

“I think there's an opportunity hopefully for religion to be not so much used as a cudgel but invoked as a way of calling us to higher values.”

“I think a lot about intergenerational justice. Short-term versus long-term helps to explain a lot of the policy disagreements that happen between the parties, and I would argue that in most ways, we are the party with more long-term thinking.”

“Building a wall won't solve our border security challenges.”