Pete Buttigieg > Quotes

“Good policy, like good literature, takes personal lived experience as its starting point. 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.”
― Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“But for others, work can only be meaningful if its fundamental purpose is in things that would matter even if no one would pay you to care about them.”
― Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“Life is short, and we do not have much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel with us; so be quick to love, make haste to be kind, and go in peace to follow the good road of blessing.”
― Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“It is easier to be cruel, or unfair, to people in groups and in the abstract; harder to do so toward a specific person in your midst,”
― Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“You can be for liberty, or you can be for banning books. You cannot be for both.”
― Pete Buttigieg

“To me, the whole episode was about what happens when a public official becomes obsessed with ideology and forgets that the chessboard on which he is playing out his strategy is, to a great many people, their own life story. Good policy, like good literature, takes personal lived experience as its starting point. 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.”
― Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“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.”
― Pete Buttigieg, Trust: America's Best Chance

“We all want to avoid being harmed—but if the cost of doing so is making the terrorist the thing you care about most, to the exclusion of the other things that matter in your society, then you have handed him exactly the kind of victory that makes terrorism such a frequent and successful tactic.”
― Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“The possibility of highly visible failure has an exceptional power to propel us to want to succeed, and that power can be harnessed to motivate a team or even a community to do something difficult.”
― Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“Rawls became famous for creating a new definition of justice, which boils down to this: a society is fair if it looks like something we would design before knowing how we would come into the world. He imagined a fictional “original position,” the position we would be in if we were told we were about to be born, but were not told about the circumstances we would be born into—how tall or short we would be, or of what race or nationality, or what resources or personal qualities we would have. This vision of justice is often compared to being asked how you would want a cake to be divided if you did not know which piece will be yours: equally, of course.”
― Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“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.”
― Pete Buttigieg, Trust: America's Best Chance

“It had been on my mind ever since allowing myself to call President Trump a "draft-dodging chickenhawk" during one of the DNC forums. While true, that statement was not in keeping with how I publicly speak about political figures, or anyone else, and afterward I reflected that this president was inspiring a loss of decency not just in his supporters, but also in those of us who opposed him. It was another way of looking at the moral stakes of politics as it filters through to millions of lives: that we might all be growing into harder and perhaps worse people, as a consequence of political leadership that failed to call us to our highest values.”
― Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“Nothing is more human than to resist loss, which is why cynical politicians can get pretty far by offering up the fantasy that a loss can be reversed rather than overcome the hard way. This is the deepest lie of our recent national politics, the core falsehood encoded in "Make America Great Again." Beneath the impossible promises -- that coal alone will fuel our future, that a big wall can be built around our status quo, that climate change isn't even real -- is the deeper fantasy that time itself can be reversed, all losses restored, and thus no new ways of life required.”
― Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“She described her new treatment with a topical chemotherapy that came in the form of a potent cream that she applied, wearing gloves, to burn off the cancerous areas—then she produced a package of the stuff from the bathroom so I could see how mundane this lifesaving medication looked. I blinked in disbelief as she held up what resembled a tube of toothpaste, and explained that each one cost over two thousand dollars. Or that’s what it would cost, if not for the insurance she had purchased through the health insurance exchanges that had been set up as part of Obamacare. I thought—and spoke—of that moment often, later, as I talked about why health policy was not a theoretical question for our family.”
― Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“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.”
― Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“AN ADVENTURE IS ONLY an inconvenience rightly considered,”
― Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“In the mirror, I make eye contact with an unshaven, bleary-eyed man in his mid-thirties, looking harmless but not thrilled to see me at this hour. I’ll just never be a morning person.”
― Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“To believe that your hopes of election depend on fewer people voting is to have a tragically weak level of trust in the value of your own positions, and your ability to defend them.”
― Pete Buttigieg, Trust: America's Best Chance

“Common decency can kick in before there is time for prejudice to intervene.”
― Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“Politics at its worst is ugly, but politics at its best is magnificent. Because it's not just about policy. It is soulcraft and it is moral.”
― Pete Buttigieg

“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.”
― Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“Doubt is our product,” said the memo, “since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the best means for establishing a controversy.”2”
― Pete Buttigieg, Trust: America's Best Chance

“It was part of my job to work well with anyone who could help the city. But Pence’s fanaticism was hard to overlook, knowing how it had impacted me as a mayor—and as a person.”
― Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“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.”
― Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“It is easier to be cruel, or unfair, to people in groups and in the abstract; harder to do so toward a specific person in your midst, especially if you know them already.”
― Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“Our ability to trust in institutions and in one another—the ability to trust that we are subject to the same facts, even living in the same reality—is now endangered. A combination of causes has brought us to this point, a crisis of trust that has the potential to be paralyzing.”
― Pete Buttigieg, Trust: America's Best Chance

“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.”
― Pete Buttigieg, Trust: America's Best Chance

“there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.”
― Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“You don’t always have to take the bait.”
― Pete Buttigieg

“If our first response toward anyone who struggles to get onto the right side of history is to denounce him as a bigot, we will force him into a defensive crouch -- or into the arms of the extreme right.”
― Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future