Pat > Pat's Quotes

“Choose your battles well. There is no point in launching a fight over some minor matter. Pay your parking tickets, but fight like hell if your land is under threat, if your local farmers' market is being moved or closed, or the open wild land next door is proposed for two hundred condominiums.”
― Michael Ableman

“It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer. But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's highest callings.

[Can You Believe in God and Evolution? Time Magazine, August 7, 2005]”
― Steven Pinker

“Do the unexpected. Take 20 minutes out of your day, do what young people all over the world are dying to do: vote.”
― Rick Mercer

“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“There is no cowardice in removing yourself from a wildly unhealthy and unwinnable situation . . . You shouldn't feel like you have to play . . . you don't owe anyone anything. You don't have to be available to everyone. You can stop.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“I was never in danger. Nothing bad can happen to you if you're with your mom. Your mom can stop a bullet from lodging in your heart. She can prop you up when you can't. You mom is your blood and bone before your body even knows how to make any.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“Fitting is a luxury rarely given to immigrants, or children of immigrants. We are stuck in emotional purgatory. Home, somehow, is always the last place you left, and never the place you're in.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn't know about. That makes me angry. I'm not an optimist. That makes me sound naive. I'm a very serious “possibilist”. That’s something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful.”
― Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

“Forming your worldview by relying on the media would be like forming your view about me by looking only at a picture of my foot.”
― Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

“the final tally of what will be considered the end of the epidemic [but not, to be clear, the end of the virus; it will burrow, digging in like a nasty tick; it will migrate; and it will return all but encouraged and welcomed in a country where science and forethought are allowed to be dirty words, where humanity’s greatest invention—the vaccine—is smeared and vilified by narcissistic, purposeful fools [the most dangerous kind, where fear is harvested for fame, profit, and self-esteem], almost ten thousand people will have died. *”
― Paul Tremblay, Survivor Song

“a myopic, sluggish federal bureaucracy further hamstrung by a president unwilling and woefully unequipped to make the rational, science-based decisions necessary; and exacerbated, of course, by plain old individual everyday evil.”
― Paul Tremblay, Survivor Song

“GMOs are found in more than 70 percent of processed foods. More than sixty-four countries around the world require GMOs to be labeled or regulated. The United States does not.”
― Vani Hari, The Food Babe Way: Break Free from the Hidden Toxins in Your Food and Lose Weight, Look Years Younger, and Get Healthy in Just 21 Days!

“In 1993, the FDA granted approval to Monsanto for its genetically engineered recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), brand-named Posilac, for use by the nation’s dairy farmers. It increases milk production by about 10 percent over a cow’s life cycle. It’s the largest-selling cattle pharmaceutical in the United States. But Posilac has always been controversial. More and more cancer specialists are apprehensive, because it may increase the risk for breast, colon, and prostate cancers in humans. Unless the milk you’re drinking is clearly marked “organic” or “rBGH free,” it probably contains this hormone. Incidentally, Posilac is banned in Europe, Canada, Australia, and Japan. This should tell us something.”
― Vani Hari, The Food Babe Way: Break Free from the Hidden Toxins in Your Food and Lose Weight, Look Years Younger, and Get Healthy in Just 21 Days!

“We need a certain amount of fat in our diets, anyway. It helps us absorb vitamins A, D, K, and E. Unsaturated fats from nuts, olive oil, sesame oil, and avocados prevent heart disease. Coconut oil helps lower cholesterol and reduce abdominal fat.”
― Vani Hari, The Food Babe Way: Break Free from the Hidden Toxins in Your Food and Lose Weight, Look Years Younger, and Get Healthy in Just 21 Days!

“If incarceration worked to secure safety, we would be the safest nation in all of human history.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“To me, the whole episode was about what happens when a public official becomes obsessed with ideology and forgets that the chessboard on which he is playing out his strategy is, to a great many people, their own life story. Good policy, like good literature, takes personal lived experience as its starting point. At its best, the practice of politics is about taking steps that support people in daily life—or tearing down obstacles that get in their way. Much of the confusion and complication of ideological battles might be washed away if we held our focus on the lives that will be made better, or worse, by political decisions, rather than on the theoretical elegance of the policies or the character of the politicians themselves.”
― Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“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, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“Nothing is more human than to resist loss, which is why cynical politicians can get pretty far by offering up the fantasy that a loss can be reversed rather than overcome the hard way. This is the deepest lie of our recent national politics, the core falsehood encoded in "Make America Great Again." Beneath the impossible promises -- that coal alone will fuel our future, that a big wall can be built around our status quo, that climate change isn't even real -- is the deeper fantasy that time itself can be reversed, all losses restored, and thus no new ways of life required.”
― Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“Rawls became famous for creating a new definition of justice, which boils down to this: a society is fair if it looks like something we would design before knowing how we would come into the world. He imagined a fictional “original position,” the position we would be in if we were told we were about to be born, but were not told about the circumstances we would be born into—how tall or short we would be, or of what race or nationality, or what resources or personal qualities we would have. This vision of justice is often compared to being asked how you would want a cake to be divided if you did not know which piece will be yours: equally, of course.”
― Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“She described her new treatment with a topical chemotherapy that came in the form of a potent cream that she applied, wearing gloves, to burn off the cancerous areas—then she produced a package of the stuff from the bathroom so I could see how mundane this lifesaving medication looked. I blinked in disbelief as she held up what resembled a tube of toothpaste, and explained that each one cost over two thousand dollars. Or that’s what it would cost, if not for the insurance she had purchased through the health insurance exchanges that had been set up as part of Obamacare. I thought—and spoke—of that moment often, later, as I talked about why health policy was not a theoretical question for our family.”
― Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“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, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“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

“there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.”
― Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“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, Trust: America's Best Chance

“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, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“It had been on my mind ever since allowing myself to call President Trump a "draft-dodging chickenhawk" during one of the DNC forums. While true, that statement was not in keeping with how I publicly speak about political figures, or anyone else, and afterward I reflected that this president was inspiring a loss of decency not just in his supporters, but also in those of us who opposed him. It was another way of looking at the moral stakes of politics as it filters through to millions of lives: that we might all be growing into harder and perhaps worse people, as a consequence of political leadership that failed to call us to our highest values.”
― Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“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, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“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, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“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, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“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, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future