2000

• A new attitude has swept American politics. Candidates have discovered that is easier to be elected by not offending anyone rather than by impressing the voters. Politicians are rushing for the center, careful not to stick their necks out on issues. Most Democrats shy away from the word “liberal” like a horrid accusation.
  • Bernie Sanders, John F. Kennedy Library, 2000 

2003

• On one hand, the right wing is replete with personalities who undermine everything they profess to stand for. Across the aisle, members of a Democratic party, aghast at the hypocrisy of their counterparts’ personalities, seem themselves reluctant to demonstrate any personality at all.
  • Hollywood Hypocrisy vs. Neo-Liberal Neurosis, The Harvard Crimson, 27 October 2003 

• The real challenge for the Democratic Party, and its presidential candidates in particular, is to figure out how to reverse the Right’s stranglehold on our political vocabulary, without adopting the kind of lock-step dogmatic monolithism that empowered the likes of Gingrich. I don’t have a quick solution handy, but I’m pretty sure that if the Dems don’t act fast to reclaim our language, they risk losing the word battle before they realize they’re fighting it.
  • The Struggle for Language, The Harvard Crimson, 8 December 2003 

2004

• Politics is in my bones. I grew up hearing my parents hollering at the TV.
  • Ken Gewertz (2 December 2004), Rhodes Scholars announced, The Harvard Gazette 

2012

• The economic equivalent of a tornado did go through town. And it's not just in a symbolic way. It's in a physical way. You look at some of these buildings, and it literally looks like a bomb went off or like a natural disaster happened. So, you know, getting past that legacy - and if I don't I'll be in trouble - getting past that legacy is not going to be easy, and it's not going to be obvious.
  • Sonari Glinton (5 July 2012), A Company Town Reinvents Itself In South Bend, Ind., Peconic Public Broadcasting 

2015

• 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. Putting something this personal on the pages of a newspaper does not come easy. We Midwesterners are instinctively private to begin with, and I’m not used to viewing this as anyone else’s business. But it’s clear to me that at a moment like this, being more open about it could do some good.
  • South Bend mayor: Why coming out matters, South Bend Tribune, 16 June 2015 

2016

• I am a Democrat because I believe in protecting freedom, fairness, families, and the future.
  • A letter from flyover country, Medium, 17 December 2016 

2017

• If anything I think my story might help illustrate why categories aren’t as important as we think. I’m a church-going, gay, millennial, Red State mayor. I’m also a left-handed Maltese American. I also spent Thanksgiving in a deer blind with my partner’s father. So am I supposed to be a Republican or a Democrat?
  • David Lawler (5 January 2017), Pete Buttigieg: meet the Indiana mayor Barack Obama says could be the future of the Democratic Party, The Telegraph 

• Military service used to be something that we had in common. It’s where people like a young John F Kennedy would meet farm kids and would work side by side with African Americans, maybe for the first time in their lives. At the time [in 2009] it felt like the reverse. It felt like it reinforced the divides.
  • David Lawler (5 January 2017), Pete Buttigieg: meet the Indiana mayor Barack Obama says could be the future of the Democratic Party, The Telegraph 

• A lot of folks were telling me I was the future while I was really trying to concentrate on the present. They would say all kinds of nice things and then swear up and down that I was their second vote, which was a nice way of saying, ‘I’m not going to vote for you.’
  • Sam Stein (8 March 2017), Pete Buttigieg Is The Future Of The Democratic Party. But What Kind Of Future?, HuffPost 

2019

• We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless, and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights, while also promoting equal rights for women. We have to encourage a return to traditional moral values. Most importantly, we have to promote general social concern, and less materialism in young people.
  • Pete Buttigieg Presidential Campaign Announcement, C-SPAN, 15 April 2019 

• The problem is that they're telling us to look for greatness in all the wrong places. Because if there's one thing that the city of South Bend has shown, it's that there's no such thing as an honest politics that revolves around the word "Again". It is time to walk away from the politics from the politics of the past and towards something totally different. So that's why I'm here today. I'm here to join you to make a little news. My name is Pete Buttigieg. They call me Mayor Pete. I am a proud son of South Bend, Indiana, and I am running for President of the United States.
  • Pete Buttigieg Presidential Campaign Announcement, C-SPAN, 15 April 2019 

• As a military officer serving under Don't Ask Don't Tell and as an elected official in the state of Indiana when Mike Pence was governor, at a certain point, when it came to professional setbacks I had to wonder whether just acknowloging who I was was going to be the ultimate, career-ending professional setback. I came back from the deployment and realised that you only get to live one life and I was not interested in not knowing what it was like to be in love any longer. So I just came out. I had no idea what kind of professional setback it would be especially cos, incoveniently, it was an election year in my socially conservative community. What happened was that when I trusted voters to judge me on the job that I did for them, they decided to trust me and re-elected me with 80% of the vote and what I learned was that trust can be reciprocated and that part of how you can win and derserve to win is to know what's worth more to you than winning.
  • Said in the Democratic Party TV debates on 12 September 2019. Video footage can be found in a tweet from Buttigieg's account.