Pete Buttigieg

“Greatness will come by looking forward - untethered from the politics of the past and anchored by our shared values - and by changing our nation's future.”

“By the way, if you ever watch Prince Harry on a panel or giving a talk, you can tell that as royals go, he's comparatively normal, and I think that's largely because he had a workplace experience with people with radically different social backgrounds.”

“To me, what's really important about the Green New Deal isn't, like, one of the elements of it: it's the concept. It's the concept that we have a national emergency commensurate with a depression or a war. And then the second part of it, the concept that, in rising to meet that challenge, there's a ton of economic opportunity.”

“One of the reasons we set up this country, one of the things we celebrate in freedom and democracy of the United States is you can criticize your president. You can criticize the ways in which the country falls short of its values.”

“The background of a mayor of a city of any size is a background of somebody who on one hand is an executive and on the other hand is very close to the ground.”

“I don't have to go on a tour to find out what's happening in middle America. I just go to Target.”

“We need to intentionally invest in health, in home ownership, in entrepreneurship, in access to democracy, in economic empowerment. If we don't do these things, we shouldn't be surprised that racial inequality persists because inequalities compound.”

“We need to consider a financial transactions tax. And we need to ask whether the top marginal tax rates are really appropriate, given that the effective tax rates paid by the wealthy are often actually lower than those paid by the rest of us.”

“There's this romantic idea that's built up around war. But the pragmatic view is there are tons of people of my generation who have lost their lives, lost their marriages, or lost their health as a consequence of being sent to wars which could have been avoided.”

“My high school in South Bend had nearly a thousand students. Statistically, that means that several dozen were gay or lesbian. Yet, when I graduated in 2000, I had yet to encounter a single openly LGBT student there.”

“I have not reached a considered position on the question of court-packing. Although I don't think we should be laughing at it.”

“The center of gravity of the American people is way to the left of the center of gravity of Congress and, in many ways, to the left of the national Democratic Party.”

“So much of what Christ's teachings are about have to do with the way that we take care of the least among us.”

“I think there's a lot to be said for changing the balance of what we tax: wealth versus work.”

“Our right to practice our faith freely is respected up to the point where doing so involves harming others.”

“Because reading is a way of putting yourself in someone else's experience, especially reading fiction.”

“Being gay isn't something you choose, but you do face choices about whether and how to discuss it.”

“I am not skilled enough or energetic enough to craft a persona. I just have to be who I am and hope people like it.”

“In my generation, thankfully, as somebody who served in the Afghanistan War, would have served in the Iraq War, if called to do so - was also strongly against the Iraq War, from the beginning - I'm so thankful that we live in a moment that we can honor the troops separately from policy.”

“Those of us who work in politics can only make ourselves useful if our heads are filled with things that we can contribute to the political space.”