J.D. Vance Quotes

#1. We don't study as children, and we don't make our kids study when we're parents. Our kids perform poorly in school. We might get angry with them, but we never give them the tools - like peace and quiet at home - to succeed.

J.D. Vance

#2. The more harried a customer, the more they purchased precooked or frozen food, the more likely they were to be poor. And I knew they were poor because of the clothes they wore or because they purchased their food with food stamps.

J.D. Vance

#3. But yeah, like everyone else in our family, they could go from zero to murderous in a fucking heartbeat.

J.D. Vance

#4. Folks would discuss whether the Antichrist was already alive and, if so, which world leader it might be.

J.D. Vance

#5. Sometimes I view members of the elite with an almost primal scorn - recently, an acquaintance used the word "confabulate" in a sentence, and I just wanted to scream. But

J.D. Vance

#6. You can't just cast aside family members because they seem uninterested in you. You've got to make the effort, because they're family.

J.D. Vance

#7. As the economies of Kentucky and West Virginia lagged behind those of their neighbors, the mountains had only two products that the industrial economies of the North needed: coal and hill people. And Appalachia exported a lot of both. Precise

J.D. Vance

#8. A lot of students just don't understand what's out there," she told me, shaking her head. "You have the kids who plan on being baseball players but don't even play on the high school team because the coach is mean to them.

J.D. Vance

#9. I want people to understand something I learned only recently: that for those of us lucky enough to live the American Dream, the demons of the life we left behind continue to chase us. There

J.D. Vance

#10. As we talked, I noticed little quirks that few others would. He didn't want to share his milk shake, which

J.D. Vance

#11. Research does reveal a genetic disposition to substance abuse, but those who believe their addiction is a disease show less of an inclination to resist it.

J.D. Vance

#12. My parents' mistakes were not my fault, so I had no reason to hide them.

J.D. Vance

#13. I've never heard anyone else called "the nicest person in the world." For Gail, it's an entirely deserved title.

J.D. Vance

#14. whenever people ask me what I'd most like to change about the white working class, I say, "The feeling that our choices don't matter.

J.D. Vance

#15. Out of the frying pan and into the fire. Chaos begets chaos. Instability begets instability.

J.D. Vance

#16. The old adage says that it's better to be lucky than good. Apparently having the right network is better than both. At

J.D. Vance

#17. ...I had an acute sense that the walls were closing in on "real" Christians... For the first time in my life, I felt like a persecuted minority.

J.D. Vance

#18. The irony is that for poor people like us, an education at Notre Dame is both cheaper and finer. We

J.D. Vance

#19. I guess I just wanted reassurance. "Mamaw, does God love us?" She hung her head, gave me a hug, and began to cry.

J.D. Vance

#20. Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times.

J.D. Vance

#21. The statistics tell you that kids like me face a grim future - that if they're lucky, they'll manage to avoid welfare; and if they're unlucky, they'll die of a heroin

J.D. Vance

#22. ...intricate stone carvings and wood trim gave the law school an almost medieval feel. You'd even sometimes hear that we went to HLS (Hogwarts Law School).

J.D. Vance

#23. Mamaw always had two gods: Jesus Christ and the United States of America. I was no different, and neither was anyone else I knew. I'm

J.D. Vance

#24. Pajamas? Poor people don't wear pajamas. We fall asleep in our underwear or blue jeans. To this day, I find the very notion of pajamas an unnecessary elite indulgence, like caviar or electric ice cube makers.

J.D. Vance

#25. Nothing compares to the fear that you're becoming the monster in your closet. During

J.D. Vance

#26. We probably watched it together five or six times. Mamaw saw Arnold Schwarzenegger as the embodiment of the American Dream: a strong, capable immigrant coming out on top.

J.D. Vance

#27. Psychologists call it "learned helplessness" when a person believes, as I did during my youth, that the choices I made had no effect on the outcomes in my life.

J.D. Vance

#28. But I often wonder: Where would I be without them? I think

J.D. Vance

#29. I've achieved something quite ordinary, which doesn't happen to most kids who grow up like me.

J.D. Vance

#30. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family. The

J.D. Vance

#31. No pep talk or speech could show me how it felt to transition from seeking shelter to providing it. I had to learn that for myself, and once I did, there was no going back.

J.D. Vance

#32. The wealthy and the powerful aren't just wealthy and powerful; they follow a different set of norms and mores.

J.D. Vance

#33. In a given year, 640,000 children, most of them poor, will spend at least some time in foster care.

J.D. Vance

#34. People like Brian and me don't lose contact with our parents because we don't care; we lose contact with them to survive. We never stop loving, and we never lose hope that our loved ones will change. Rather, we are forced, either by wisdom or by the law, to take the path of self-preservation.

J.D. Vance

#35. Public policy can help, but there is no government that can fix these problems for us. Recall

J.D. Vance

#36. I don't know what the answer is, precisely, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.

J.D. Vance

#37. The lesson? Powerful people sometimes do things to help people like me without really understanding people like me.

J.D. Vance

#38. We felt trapped in two seemingly unwinnable wars, in which a disproportionate share of the fighters came from our neighborhood, and in an economy that failed to deliver the most basic promise of the American Dream - a steady wage.

J.D. Vance

#39. There is no group of Americans more pessimistic than working-class whites. Well over half of blacks, Latinos, and college-educated whites expect that their children will fare better economically than they have. Among working-class whites, only 44 percent share that expectation.

J.D. Vance

#40. People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown. You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.

J.D. Vance

#41. But it was there, and studies now show that working-class boys like me do much worse in school because they view schoolwork as a feminine endeavor.

J.D. Vance

#42. believe that hard work pays off, then you work hard; if you think it's hard to get ahead even when you try, then why try at all? Similarly,

J.D. Vance

#43. Section 8 vouchers ought to be administered in a way that doesn't segregate the poor into little enclaves.

J.D. Vance

#44. that report proves is that many folks talk about working more than they actually work. Of

J.D. Vance

#45. The best part about living with Mamaw was that I began to understand what made her tick. Until then, I had resented how rarely we traveled to Kentucky after Mamaw Blanton's death. The

J.D. Vance

#46. However you want to define these two groups and their approach to giving - rich and poor; educated and uneducated; upper-class and working-class - their members increasingly occupy two separate worlds. As

J.D. Vance

#47. The constant moving and fighting, the seemingly endless carousel of new people I had to meet, learn to love, and then forget - this, and not my subpar public school, was te real barrior to opportunity.

J.D. Vance

#48. There is nothing lower than the poor stealing from the poor. It's hard enough as it is. We sure as hell don't need to make it even harder on each other.

J.D. Vance

#49. They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves." I

J.D. Vance

#50. For there are no villains in this story.

J.D. Vance

#51. Lindsay was a teenager...at the height of that weird mixture of thinking you know everything and caring too much about how others perceive you.

J.D. Vance

#52. People didn't leave because our downtown lacked trendy cultural amenities. The trendy cultural amenities left because there weren't enough consumers in Middletown to support them.

J.D. Vance

#53. During my last year of high school, I tried out for the varsity golf team. For about a year, I'd taken golf lessons from an old golf pro.

J.D. Vance

#54. Manliness meant strength, courage, a willingness to fight, and, later, success with girls. Boys who got good grades were "sissies" or "faggots." I don't know where I got this feeling.

J.D. Vance

#55. The measure of a man is how he treats the women in his family.

J.D. Vance

#56. So, to Papaw and Mamaw, not all rich people were bad, but all bad people were rich.

J.D. Vance

#57. It's hard to put a dollar value on that advice. It's the kind of thing that continues to pay dividends. But make no mistake: The advice had tangible economic value.

J.D. Vance

#58. Mamaw and Papaw ensured that I knew the basic rules of fighting: You never start a fight; you always end the fight if someone else starts it; and even though you never start a fight, it's maybe okay to start one if a man insults your family. This last rule was unspoken but clear.

J.D. Vance

#59. ACEs happen everywhere, in every community. But studies have shown that ACEs are far more common in my corner of the demographic world. A

J.D. Vance

#60. He sent an older marine to supervise as I shopped for my first car so that I'd end up with a practical car, like a Toyota or a Honda, not the BMW I wanted.

J.D. Vance

#61. the real problem for so many of these kids is what happens (or doesn't happen) at home.

J.D. Vance

#62. Kind of boring, by some standards, but happy in a way you appreciate only when you understand the consequences of not being boring.

J.D. Vance

#63. were her kids. But the drugs and the late-night fighting revealed troubles that too many hillbilly transplants knew too well. Confronted with such a realization of her own family's struggle, Mamaw

J.D. Vance

#64. In other words, despite all of the environmental pressures from my neighborhood and community, I received a different message at home. And that just might have saved me.

J.D. Vance

#65. ...bad neighborhoods no longer plague only urban ghettos; the bad neighborhoods have spread to the suburbs.

J.D. Vance

#66. Harvard pediatricians have studied the effect that childhood trauma has on the mind. In addition to later negative health consequences, the doctors found that constant stress can actually change the chemistry of a child's brain. Stress, after

J.D. Vance

#67. ...Mom equated money with affection...but I never cared about the money. I just wanted her to be healthy.

J.D. Vance

#68. It's about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.

J.D. Vance

#69. Never be like these fucking losers who think the deck is stacked against them," my grandma often told me. "You can do anything you want to." Their

J.D. Vance

#70. With all due respect to those people, I think that theory is a load of bullshit. Whatever talents I have, I almost squandered until a handful of loving people rescued me. That

J.D. Vance

#71. These were quirks, and at first I understood them as little more than strict rules that I could either comply with or get around. Yet I was a curious kid, and the deeper I immersed myself in evangelical theology, the more I felt compelled to mistrust many sectors of society.

J.D. Vance

#72. There're fewer emotional and financial resources when the only people in a neighborhood are low-income. You just can't lump them together, because then you have a bigger pool of hopelessness.

J.D. Vance

#73. There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day. Here

J.D. Vance

#74. He was hungry. IN 2014, in the richest country on earth, he wanted a little extra to eat but felt uncomfortable asking. Lord help us.

J.D. Vance

#75. what I remember most of all is that I was happy - I no longer feared the school bell at the end of the day, I knew where I'd be living the next month, and no one's romantic decisions affected my life. And out of that happiness came so many of the opportunities I've had for the past twelve years.

J.D. Vance

#76. What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It's not your fault that you're a loser; it's the government's fault.

J.D. Vance

#77. We ate the same foods, watched the same sports, and practiced the same religion. That's why I felt so much kinship with those people at the courthouse: They were hillbilly transplants in one way or another, just like me.

J.D. Vance

#78. In other words, bad neighborhoods no longer plague only urban ghettos; the bad neighborhoods have spread to the suburbs. This

J.D. Vance

#79. We choose not to work when we should be looking for jobs.

J.D. Vance

#80. Here is where the rhetoric of modern conservatives (and I say this as one of them) fails to meet the real challenges of their biggest constituents. Instead of encouraging engagement, conservatives increasingly foment the kind of detachment that has sapped the ambition of so many of my peers.

J.D. Vance

#81. Today people look at me, at my job and my Ivy League credentials, and assume that I'm some sort of genius, that only a truly extraordinary person could have made it to where I am today. With all due respect to those people, I think that theory is a load of bullshit. Whatever

J.D. Vance

#82. I believe we hillbillies are the toughest goddamned people on this earth. We take an electric saw to the hide of those who insult our mother. We

J.D. Vance

#83. Hillbilly culture at the time (and maybe now) blended a robust sense of honor, devotion to family, and bizarre sexism into a sometimes explosive mix.

J.D. Vance

#84. I was nine months old the first time Mamaw saw my mother put Pepsi in my bottle.

J.D. Vance

#85. There is a lack of agency here - a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself.

J.D. Vance