Quotes from Pete Buttigieg

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.

I think people in our party tie themselves up in pretzels trying to be more electable.

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.

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.

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.

My surname, Buttigieg (Boot-edge-edge), is very common in my father's country of origin, the tiny island of Malta, and nowhere else.

'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.

Being the mayor of your hometown is the best job in America, partly because it's relatively nonpartisan - we focus on results, not ideology.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

We can't look for greatness in the past.

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.

There's a lot to be said for expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit.

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.

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.

The death penalty has been one of many examples where racial discrimination has played out. You can see it in the simple fact that someone convicted of the same crime is more likely to face the death penalty if they are black.

Being attentive to the things that add meaning to our lives alongside politics will help us inform our politics with the values that really do make America great.

You're not free if you can't marry the person you love because a county clerk is imposing his or her interpretation of religion on you.

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.