Mahi

“I work for the city.” “All right. Can anyone else do your job?” “Not exactly.” “Are you the mayor?” he asked sarcastically. “Um . . .”
― Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“Don’t listen to what people tell you because they’ll try to bring you down. And don’t listen to yourself, either, because yourself will try to bring you down even more so than anyone else. As long as you just put all your energy into one thing, it can happen.”
― Chris Colfer

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

“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