You can't understand America without understanding the Puritans. In many ways, we're still living out their legacy in ways that are good and bad.
— Pete Buttigieg
I think people in our party tie themselves up in pretzels trying to be more electable.
You could be a senior senator and have never managed more than a hundred people in your life.
Donald Trump got elected because, in his twisted way, he pointed out the huge troubles in our economy and our democracy.
So much of politics is about people's relationships with themselves. You do better if you make people feel secure in who they are.
The decision to serve needs to be independent of your politics.
We've never been a party to obstruct for obstruction sake.
We can't look for greatness in the past.
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.
An election is supposed to be about our whole country - we can't just concentrate on those areas where people, for the most part, already agree with us.
By high school, I had traded my oversized, thick glasses for contact lenses, but my eyesight was getting worse every year, smothering my childhood aspiration of becoming an astronaut or, at least, a pilot.
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 surname, Buttigieg (Boot-edge-edge), is very common in my father's country of origin, the tiny island of Malta, and nowhere else.
As the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, I see on a daily basis the impact of politics and policy on my family, neighbors, friends, and residents.
The Electoral College needs to go, because it's made our society less and less democratic.
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.
I think most Americans understand that we deserve to have universal health care, as enjoyed by most citizens in most developed countries.
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 just feel more comfortable with my sleeves rolled up.
I've always been terrible at land navigation.
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.
Things are changing tectonically in our country, and we can't just keep doing what we've been doing.
The old line of thought used to be that local government is the bush leagues.
If somebody is saying that I should not compete because I'm a man, I don't know what to say to that. And if somebody is saying that I had it easy, I would invite them to join the military and enter Indiana politics in 2010 as a gay person. See how easy they find it.
Experiences with friends or family members coming out have helped millions of Americans to see past stereotypes and better understand what being gay is - and is not.
On this National Immigration Day of Action, it is worth remembering that it's not just Americans in New York or Los Angeles who believe that we need a more humane and rational system.
'Palaces for the People' reads more like a succession of case studies than a comprehensive account of what social infrastructure is, so those looking for a theoretical framework may be disappointed.
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.
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.
Most people have trouble pronouncing my name, so they just call me 'Mayor Pete.'
Presidents going live from the Oval Office have used that platform to inform the American public, and also to do one of the most important parts of their job: to inspire the best in us.
When I think about where most of Scripture points me, it is toward defending the poor, and the immigrant, and the stranger, and the prisoner, and the outcast, and those who are left behind by the way society works.
My understanding of my faith is that - through a Christian framework - part of what we are called to do is to lay down our own self-interests, after the model of divinity that comes into this world in the form of Christ and lays down his life. And in order to do that, you have to care about something or someone more than yourself.
The world is changing, but it is not changing on its own.
I've never believed in running for office so you can eventually run for some other office.
'Freedom' means a lot to conservatives, but they have such a narrow sense of what it means. They think a lot about freedom from - freedom from government, freedom from regulation - and precious little about freedom to. Freedom to is absolutely something that has to be safeguarded by good government, just as it could be impaired by bad government.
I get the urge people will have after Trump. 'Look at the chaos and the exhaustion: Wouldn't it be better to go back to something more stable with somebody we know?' But there's no going back to a pre-Trump universe. We can't be saying the system will be fine again just like it was. Because that's not true; it wasn't fine.
I have not reached a considered position on the question of court-packing. Although I don't think we should be laughing at it.
Military service might sound like a totally different environment, but every experience you fall back on later, it makes you smarter. Why wouldn't that be true of the military, too?
Mayors love lists when they say something good about their city and hate them when they don't.
When people are economically or socially dislocated, they are always more vulnerable to being radicalized.
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.
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.
In 'Palaces for the People,' Eric Klinenberg offers a new perspective on what people and places have to do with each other, by looking at the social side of our physical spaces.
When I was fourteen, Mom and Dad sent me to St. Joseph High School, the Catholic school up the hill from our place, housed in a 1950s-era tan brick building sometimes confused for a light industrial structure due to the surprisingly high smokestack of its old incinerator.
Being the mayor of your hometown is the best job in America, partly because it's relatively nonpartisan - we focus on results, not ideology.
Wall-to-wall coverage of the political intrigue in Washington focuses on which Capitol Hill players won the daily news cycle, with barely any reference to the communities and lives where politicians' decisions actually hit home.
The first news event I understood as a small child was the loss of the space shuttle Challenger, which President Reagan eloquently mourned from the Oval that evening.
It's time to join the ranks of nations that have put the ugliness of capital punishment behind them.
So much of what Christ's teachings are about have to do with the way that we take care of the least among us.
