"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.’"

“We have to recognize that the China challenge is a serious one. This is not something to dismiss or waive away. China is using technology for the perfection of dictatorship.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I am a Democrat because I believe in protecting freedom, fairness, families, and the future.”

“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.”

“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.”