Top 30 Pete Buttigieg Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

3. “You don’t always have to take the bait.”

— Pete Buttigieg

4. “A river is made drop by drop.”

— Pete Buttigieg

5. “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

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

9. “It now feels like an odd assurance to have had to make, since the attack happened hundreds of miles away, but that day it seemed as if we all had to check on each other for injury, as if anyone we cared about might have been harmed that morning just by being in the same world where this had happened.”

— Pete Buttigieg

10. “We cannot have a free Government without elections, and if the rebellion could force us to forego or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us.”

— Pete Buttigieg

11. “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

12. “Ours is not an ethnic identity, but a civic one. This means that for us, even more than for most people around the world, a sense of trust is not just strategically important but existentially meaningful. If the cornerstone of American identity is democracy, the cornerstone of democracy is trust.”

— Pete Buttigieg

13. “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

14. “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.”

— Pete Buttigieg

15. “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

16. “Addressing this question – of how to create or enhance a sense of belonging within as diverse a group as the American electorate or, even more broadly, the American people – is central to our chances of building greater trust in our country.”

— Pete Buttigieg

17. “Yet even now he looked on his days as mayor – not governor or lieutenant governor or baseball team owner or naval aviator – as the best job he’d ever had.”

— Pete Buttigieg

18. “AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America’s Upper Classes from Military Service – and How It Hurts Our Country, Kathy Roth-Douquet and Frank Schaeffer.”

— Pete Buttigieg

19. “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

20. “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

21. “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

22. “Common decency can kick in before there is time for prejudice to intervene.”

— Pete Buttigieg

23. “For purpose-driven people, this is the conundrum of client-service work: to perform at your best, you must learn how to care about something because you are hired to do.”

— Pete Buttigieg

24. “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

25. “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

26. “Korea vets in flannel shirts down from Michigan, accompanied by ruddy grandsons in Under Armour camo jackets, coexist peacefully with Montessori moms navigating strollers between clumps of grandparents eyeing big baskets of apples and small ones of plums. Trucker hats are worn without irony here; the hipsters are welcome but not in charge.”

— Pete Buttigieg

27. “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

28. “As I raised the glass and said, “South Bend is back,” the roar of the crowd at once reflected, certified, and caused it to be so.”

— Pete Buttigieg

29. “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.”

— Pete Buttigieg

30. “We will have to decide which approaches we wish to emulate from abroad, which structures we wish to dismantle from before, which strategies we wish to retrieve from our past, and which institutions we may need to fashion completely anew.”

— Pete Buttigieg

31. “And there is the note from Sherri that I found in my room while getting ready, rolled up in a ‘best son-in-law ever’ coffee mug, welcoming me to the family and ending, ‘Take care of my baby, he may be on a permanent loan to you but he will always be mine.”

— Pete Buttigieg

32. “When you are connected to an institution with that strong a name, people use it for a shortcut to understanding who you are, and if you’re not careful, you use it as a shortcut too. Taking on the shape of that name itself over time.”

— Pete Buttigieg

33. “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

34. “It’s like changing channels every five minutes between The Wire, Parks and Recreation, and, occasionally, Veep.”

— Pete Buttigieg