Top 125 Quotes & Sayings by Pete Buttigieg - Page 2

I think that policy matters. I'm a policy guy.

You could be a senior senator and have never managed more than a hundred people in your life.

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

My voting rights agenda is not that different from what you'd see in H.R. 1.

Donald Trump got elected because, in his twisted way, he pointed out the huge troubles in our economy and our democracy.

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.

I believe in capitalism as long as there's a strong rule of law around it.

We've never been a party to obstruct for obstruction sake.

I don't have a problem with enhanced border security, perhaps to include fencing. I think the mistake is believing that border security is as simple as just putting up a wall from sea to shining sea.

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.

Businesses always have competitors nipping at their heels. Historically, cities have not viewed themselves as subject to that same type of competition. But that's wrong.

Let's be under no illusions: There are attacks on, for example, transgender Americans from the Oval Office, picking on troops - people willing to lay down their lives for this country - not to mention teenagers in our high schools. So we've got to end the war on trans Americans.

A lot of these so-called left positions are actually centrist by the standards of the American people, just not by members of the American Congress.

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

I think for those of us who think that our morality is something that needs to be in touch with our religious faith personally, then it's really important to explain that no one party has a monopoly on faith.

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

I don't know how it plays in San Francisco. But I can tell you I came out, during a reelection campaign, in Indiana, while Mike Pence was the governor. And I wound up winning reelection by 80 percent.

I think most Americans understand that we deserve to have universal health care, as enjoyed by most citizens in most developed countries.

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.

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?

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.

I met my husband through an app that talks to social-networking sites, and that's how we were sort of suggested to each other, and it turned out to be a great match.

That really important freedom in my life, the freedom to marry, came about because of choices that were made by policymakers who had power over me and millions of others.

If somebody is pointing out that there are advantages - many of them unfair - that go along with being male in our society and in our politics, then I completely agree.

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

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.

As a mayor, my instinct is to really think about how to get something done and not to make the promise unless you have some view of the pathway. You don't have to have it all figured out, but you have to have a pathway there.

So much of politics is about people's relationships with themselves. You do better if you make people feel secure in who they are.

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.

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.

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.

I've never believed in running for office so you can eventually run for some other office.

The world is changing, but it is not changing on its own.

I think people are just puzzled by why people where I'm from make the political choices sometimes that they do.

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 of myself as a democratic capitalist, although I think the word 'socialism' loses its meaning every time that it is used to describe literally any policy left of far right by the current Republicans.

A Midwestern municipal government isn't the first thing that leaps to mind when you think of innovation, but it ought to be.

As a consultant at McKinsey, I learned the value of data and the ability to shape that information into an answer.

You can't just let companies self-regulate, and I've gotta think they get that, too.

If Medicare today includes Medicare supplemental, why wouldn't Medicare for all include a Medicare supplement for all who want it?

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.

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.

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.

We can't look for greatness in the past.

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

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.

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.

I was in high school when Columbine happened.

Like public surface in general, sewers are unbelievably important. They're so important that we make sure they work basically all of the time. Which is why you never think of them - that's kind of the point.

Things are changing tectonically in our country, and we can't just keep doing what we've been doing.

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.

A message is something that makes sense no matter who you're running against.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The decision to serve needs to be independent of your politics.

One respect in which I'm very much my father's son is how I feel about Joyce. 'Ulysses' is very much about daily life, when you get into this other guy's life and you learn about the things he cares about, and why he cares about them. And then, very indirectly, very subtly, you learn why politics has impacted his life, too.

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 do think, actually, one thing I noticed with Silicon Valley post-Trump is it kind of made them more politically aware, more aware that, like, business and philanthropy alone isn't going to make the world a better place.