Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Being the mayor of your hometown is the best job in America, partly because it's relatively nonpartisan - we focus on results, not ideology.
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.
As the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, I see on a daily basis the impact of politics and policy on my family, neighbors, friends, and residents.
I kept up top grades, and by senior year, a flow of mailed college recruiting brochures accumulated into an avalanche on our dining room table.
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.
Those of us who work in politics can only make ourselves useful if our heads are filled with things that we can contribute to the political space.
A lot of these so-called left positions are actually centrist by the standards of the American people, just not by members of the American Congress.
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.
Greatness will come by looking forward - untethered from the politics of the past and anchored by our shared values - and by changing our nation's future.
The most moving responses I got to my coming out in the first place was people, like teenagers, letting me know that it made their lives easier in some way.
The background of a mayor of a city of any size is a background of somebody who on one hand is an executive and on the other hand is very close to the ground.
Being attentive to the things that add meaning to our lives alongside politics will help us inform our politics with the values that really do make America great.
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.
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.
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.
The first news event I understood as a small child was the loss of the space shuttle Challenger, which President Reagan eloquently mourned from the Oval that evening.
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.
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.
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.
In 'Palaces for the People,' Eric Klinenberg offers a new perspective on what people and places have to do with each other, by looking at the social side of our physical spaces.
When you become a citizen, you are an American and questioning somebody's Americanness because they disagree with you - is about one of the most un-American things I can think of.
Military service might sound like a totally different environment, but every experience you fall back on later, it makes you smarter. Why wouldn't that be true of the military, too?
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.
Presidents going live from the Oval Office have used that platform to inform the American public, and also to do one of the most important parts of their job: to inspire the best in us.
I hope that teachings about inclusion and love win out over what I personally consider to be a handful of scriptures that reflect the moral expectations of the era in which they were recorded.
Systemic racism is something that diminishes all of us. Of course its worst effects are for its victims, but our entire country is held back through the inequality and the mistrust that it creates.
What's worse: a president who is very faithful to an ideology that you find extreme, or a president who is very cynical and appears to have no ideology at all? Neither one of those things is great.
'Palaces for the People' reads more like a succession of case studies than a comprehensive account of what social infrastructure is, so those looking for a theoretical framework may be disappointed.
I don't have a problem with enhanced border security, perhaps to include fencing. I think the mistake is believing that border security is as simple as just putting up a wall from sea to shining sea.
I don't know how it plays in San Francisco. But I can tell you I came out, during a reelection campaign, in Indiana, while Mike Pence was the governor. And I wound up winning reelection by 80 percent.
If I'm plowing the snow and filling in potholes, then I'm a good mayor, and if we fail to do that, I'm not. And it's got almost nothing to do with whether, when I come home, it's to a husband or to a wife.
By high school, I had traded my oversized, thick glasses for contact lenses, but my eyesight was getting worse every year, smothering my childhood aspiration of becoming an astronaut or, at least, a pilot.
I think of myself as a democratic capitalist, although I think the word 'socialism' loses its meaning every time that it is used to describe literally any policy left of far right by the current Republicans.
Like public surface in general, sewers are unbelievably important. They're so important that we make sure they work basically all of the time. Which is why you never think of them - that's kind of the point.
I think for those of us who think that our morality is something that needs to be in touch with our religious faith personally, then it's really important to explain that no one party has a monopoly on faith.
When I think about where most of Scripture points me, it is toward defending the poor, and the immigrant, and the stranger, and the prisoner, and the outcast, and those who are left behind by the way society works.
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.
I do think, actually, one thing I noticed with Silicon Valley post-Trump is it kind of made them more politically aware, more aware that, like, business and philanthropy alone isn't going to make the world a better place.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wall-to-wall coverage of the political intrigue in Washington focuses on which Capitol Hill players won the daily news cycle, with barely any reference to the communities and lives where politicians' decisions actually hit home.
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.
When I was deployed, I could feel a full spectrum of American power keeping me safe. And yes, that was the armor on my vehicle; yes, it was the armor on my body; but it was also the armor of some level of American moral authority.
One of the reasons we set up this country, one of the things we celebrate in freedom and democracy of the United States is you can criticize your president. You can criticize the ways in which the country falls short of its values.
I'm not sure anything makes you an outright good person or bad person - that we're all capable of doing good or bad things. And if you want to know how much good you can do, and how much hurt you can do, just ask somebody you love.
I think a lot about intergenerational justice. Short-term versus long-term helps to explain a lot of the policy disagreements that happen between the parties, and I would argue that in most ways, we are the party with more long-term thinking.
We need to consider a financial transactions tax. And we need to ask whether the top marginal tax rates are really appropriate, given that the effective tax rates paid by the wealthy are often actually lower than those paid by the rest of us.