137 Quotes by Pete Buttigieg

Then I would jump on a streetcar, along tram lines since torn out, and let it carry me into the West Side, to step off in a neighborhood and wander into a bakery full of East European delights or a tavern where people were swilling Drewrys beer and speaking the language of the old country.

When no one’s word is authoritative, any crank is as credible as the next person. It is the irony at the heart of conspiracy thinking: You can’t trust anyone these days, so you may as well place some credence in some stranger who just tweeted something exciting, if unproven. ... When someone whispers, “Trust no one,” they are inevitably also saying, “Trust me.

Of course, we can find cases of heinous situations, people perhaps who deserve to die. I've just never met anybody who deserves to kill.

I had a professional background in economic development and was fluent in the language of business - even while having fought and bled politically for organized labor in the auto industry.

The top priority of the terrorist--even more important than killing you--is to make himself your top priority. This is why protecting ourselves from terrorist violence is not enough to defeat terrorism, especially if we try to achieve safety in ways that elevate the importance of terrorists and wind up publicizing their causes.

The truth is our election system is flawed. But it will only be improved if we trust it enough to use it to elect people committed to fixing it.

At its best, the practice of politics is about taking steps that support people in daily life -- or tearing down obstacles that get in their way. Much of the confusion and complication of ideological battles might be washed away if we held our focus on the lives that will be made better, or worse, by political decisions, rather than on the theoretical elegance of the policies or the character of the politicians themselves.

To love a country, as to love a person, is to love a flawed and exquisite creation, to see what is best in it, to be angry when it is not what it could be, precisely because you have seen glimmers of its greatness.

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 minor at Harvard had been in aerobics.