Pete Buttigieg
You're not free if you can't start a small business because you fear losing your health care, and you're certainly not free if a male boss or politician prevents you from making decisions about your own reproductive health.
You're not free if you can't sue a financial institution that gets caught ripping you off.
An election is supposed to be about our whole country - we can't just concentrate on those areas where people, for the most part, already agree with us.
People in communities like Granger, Indiana, are rarely heard from on cable networks. But they, too, believe it is wrong to deport friends and neighbors who do no harm and much good.
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.
Tearing apart a community, a business, and a family will make America worse off, every time.
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.
My high school in South Bend had nearly a thousand students. Statistically, that means that several dozen were gay or lesbian. Yet, when I graduated in 2000, I had yet to encounter a single openly LGBT student there.
Experiences with friends or family members coming out have helped millions of Americans to see past stereotypes and better understand what being gay is - and is not.
We can't look for greatness in the past.
I met my husband through an app that talks to social-networking sites, and that's how we were sort of suggested to each other, and it turned out to be a great match.
To me, what success looks like is not to believe that Afghanistan can become a unified, Western-style democracy with a developed-country economy just yet. I think success in the American interest is some level of assurance that it's not going to be a place that again leads to an attack on the American homeland.
You know, I do believe that China is emerging as a competitor, not just a competitor but, in many ways, an adversary. And, you know, the Chinese model is also being held up globally as an alternative power model, and I very much believe in our model versus theirs.
If you're a white candidate, it is twice as important for you to be talking about racial inequity and not just describing the problem - which is fashionable in politics - but actually talking about what we're going to do about it and describing the outcomes we're trying to solve for.
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.
When people are economically or socially dislocated, they are always more vulnerable to being radicalized.
If somebody is pointing out that there are advantages - many of them unfair - that go along with being male in our society and in our politics, then I completely agree.
If somebody is saying that I should not compete because I'm a man, I don't know what to say to that. And if somebody is saying that I had it easy, I would invite them to join the military and enter Indiana politics in 2010 as a gay person. See how easy they find it.
We've got to find a way to use our identities to reach other people.
That really important freedom in my life, the freedom to marry, came about because of choices that were made by policymakers who had power over me and millions of others.
Let's be under no illusions: There are attacks on, for example, transgender Americans from the Oval Office, picking on troops - people willing to lay down their lives for this country - not to mention teenagers in our high schools. So we've got to end the war on trans Americans.
We've never been a party to obstruct for obstruction sake.
Mayors love lists when they say something good about their city and hate them when they don't.
The decision to serve needs to be independent of your politics.
Things are changing tectonically in our country, and we can't just keep doing what we've been doing.
There's this romantic idea that's built up around war. But the pragmatic view is there are tons of people of my generation who have lost their lives, lost their marriages, or lost their health as a consequence of being sent to wars which could have been avoided.
So much of politics is about people's relationships with themselves. You do better if you make people feel secure in who they are.
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.
Donald Trump got elected because, in his twisted way, he pointed out the huge troubles in our economy and our democracy.
I get the urge people will have after Trump. 'Look at the chaos and the exhaustion: Wouldn't it be better to go back to something more stable with somebody we know?' But there's no going back to a pre-Trump universe. We can't be saying the system will be fine again just like it was. Because that's not true; it wasn't fine.
You could be a senior senator and have never managed more than a hundred people in your life.
I think people in our party tie themselves up in pretzels trying to be more electable.
I've never believed in running for office so you can eventually run for some other office.
I think there's an opportunity hopefully for religion to be not so much used as a cudgel but invoked as a way of calling us to higher values.
Our right to practice our faith freely is respected up to the point where doing so involves harming others.
You can't understand America without understanding the Puritans. In many ways, we're still living out their legacy in ways that are good and bad.
I think people are just puzzled by why people where I'm from make the political choices sometimes that they do.
My voting rights agenda is not that different from what you'd see in H.R. 1.
In many ways, Trump appeals to people's smallness, their fears, whatever part of them wants to look backward.
The greatest nation in the world should not have much to fear from a family, especially children, fleeing violence. More importantly, children fleeing violence ought to have nothing to fear from the greatest country in the world.
I believe in capitalism as long as there's a strong rule of law around it.
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.
As a mayor, my instinct is to really think about how to get something done and not to make the promise unless you have some view of the pathway. You don't have to have it all figured out, but you have to have a pathway there.
I think that policy matters. I'm a policy guy.
A Midwestern municipal government isn't the first thing that leaps to mind when you think of innovation, but it ought to be.
Businesses always have competitors nipping at their heels. Historically, cities have not viewed themselves as subject to that same type of competition. But that's wrong.
If Medicare today includes Medicare supplemental, why wouldn't Medicare for all include a Medicare supplement for all who want it?
I think there's a lot to be said for changing the balance of what we tax: wealth versus work.