Top 250 J.D. Vance Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “As Mamaw used to say, you can take the boy out of Kentucky, but you can’t take Kentucky out of the boy.”

— J.D. Vance

2. “Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family. The.”

— J.D. Vance

3. “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

4. “We were conditioned to feel that we couldn’t really depend on people – that, even as children, asking someone for a meal or for help with a broken-down automobile was a luxury that we shouldn’t indulge in too much lest we fully tap the reservoir of goodwill serving as a safety valve in our lives.”

— J.D. Vance

5. “Mamaw Bonnie herself was so terrifying that, many decades later, a Marine Corps recruiter would tell me that I’d find boot camp easier than living at home. “Those drill instructors are mean,” he said. “But not like that grandma of yours.”

— J.D. Vance

6. “Out of the frying pan and into the fire. Chaos begets chaos. Instability begets instability.”

— J.D. Vance

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

— J.D. Vance

8. “I want people to understand how upward mobility feels. And 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.”

— J.D. Vance

9. “Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times.”

— J.D. Vance

10. “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

11. “I have known many welfare queens; some were my neighbors, and all were white.”

— J.D. Vance

12. “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

13. “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

14. “I took one sip and literally spit it out. It was the grossest thing I’d ever tasted. I remember once getting a Diet Coke at a Subway without realizing that the fountain machine didn’t have enough Diet Coke syrup. That’s exactly what this fancy place’s “sparkling” water tasted like. “Something’s wrong with that water,” I protested. The.”

— J.D. Vance

15. “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. From Middletown’s world of small expectations to the constant chaos of our home, life had taught me that I had no control. Mamaw and Papaw had saved me from succumbing entirely to that notion, and the Marine Corps broke new ground. If I had learned helplessness at home, the Marines were teaching learned willfulness. The.”

— J.D. Vance

16. “So many people abuse the system, it’s impossible for the hardworking people to get the help they need,” she’d say. This was the construct she’d built in her head: Most of the beneficiaries of the system were extravagant moochers, but she – despite never having worked in her life – was an obvious exception.”

— J.D. Vance

17. “I was nine months old the first time Mamaw saw my mother put Pepsi in my bottle.”

— J.D. Vance

18. “At the same time, they’ve shown me that social mobility isn’t just about money and economics, it’s about a lifestyle change. The wealthy and the powerful aren’t just wealthy and powerful; they follow a different set of norms and mores.”

— J.D. Vance

19. “There was no Mamaw to comfort me. But there were my two dogs on the floor, and there was the love of my life lying in bed. Tomorrow I would go to work, take the dogs to the park, buy groceries with Usha, and make a nice dinner. It was everything I ever wanted. So I patted Casper’s head and went back to sleep.”

— J.D. Vance

20. “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

21. “My address was where I spent most of my time with my mother and sister, wherever that might be. But my home never changed: my great-grandmother’s house, in the holler, in Jackson, Kentucky.”

— J.D. Vance

22. “When I asked her father about a relatively estranged family member, I expected to hear a rant about character flaws. What I heard instead was sympathy and a little sadness but primarily a life lesson: “I still call him regularly and check up on him. 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

23. “Other people have all kinds of names for their grandparents: grandpa, nana, pop pop, granny and so on, yet I’ve never heard anyone say mamaw or papaw outside of our community. These names belong only to Hillbilly grandparents.”

— J.D. Vance

24. “Nothing compares to the fear that you’re becoming the monster in your closet.”

— J.D. Vance

25. “Very few people at Yale Law School are like me. They may look like me, but for all of the Ivy League’s obsession with diversity, virtually everyone – black, white, Jewish, Muslim, whatever – comes from intact families who never worry about money.”

— J.D. Vance

26. “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

27. “She loathed disloyalty, and there was no greater disloyalty than class betrayal.”

— J.D. Vance

28. “Unfortunately, the fight-or-flight response is a destructive constant companion. As Dr. Nadine Burke Harris put it, the response is great “if you’re in a forest and there’s a bear. The problem is when that bear comes home from the bar every night.”

— J.D. Vance

29. “My parents’ mistakes were not my fault, so I had no reason to hide them.”

— J.D. Vance

30. “The day I graduated from boot camp was the proudest of my life. An entire crew of hillbillies showed up for my graduation –.”

— J.D. Vance

31. “Dad’s church required so little of me. It was easy to be a Christian. The only affirmative teachings I remember drawing from church were that I shouldn’t cheat on my wife and that I shouldn’t be afraid to preach the gospel to others. So I planned a life of monogamy and tried to convert other people, even my seventh-grade science teacher, who was Muslim.”

— J.D. Vance

32. “The Scots-Irish are one of the most distinctive subgroups in America. As one observer noted, “In traveling across America, the Scots-Irish have consistently blown my mind as far and away the most persistent and unchanging regional subculture in the country. Their family structures, religion and politics, and social lives all remain unchanged compared to the wholesale abandonment of tradition that’s occurred nearly everywhere.”

— J.D. Vance

33. “Mom was never much of a math person, but she took me to the public library before I could read, got me a library card, showed me how to use it, and always made sure I had access to kids’ books at home. 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

34. “Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree. To these folks, poverty is the family tradition – their ancestors were day laborers in the Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.”

— J.D. Vance

35. “Your sister is the only true friend you’ll ever have.”

— J.D. Vance

36. “To this day, being able to “take advantage” of someone is the measure in my mind of having a parent. For me and Lindsay, the fear of imposing stalked our minds, infecting even the food we ate.”

— J.D. Vance

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

— J.D. Vance

38. “So, to Papaw and Mamaw, not all rich people were bad, but all bad people were rich.”

— J.D. Vance

39. “I tried to go to a counselor, but it was just too weird. Talking to some stranger about my feelings made me want to vomit. I did go to the library...”

— J.D. Vance

40. “To them, the American Dream required forward momentum. Manual labor was honorable work, but it was their generation’s work – we had to do something different. To move up was to move on. That required going to college. And.”

— J.D. Vance

41. “Entire volumes are devoted to the phenomenon of “resilient children” – kids who prosper despite an unstable home because they have the social support of a loving adult. I.”

— J.D. Vance

42. “As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, “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.”

— J.D. Vance

43. “In my immature brain, I didn’t understand the difference between intelligence and knowledge. So I assumed I was an idiot. I.”

— J.D. Vance

44. “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

45. “At Yale Law School, I felt like my spaceship had crashed in Oz. People would say with a straight face that a surgeon mother and engineer father were middle-class. In Middletown, $160,000 is an unfathomable salary; at Yale Law School, students expect to earn that amount in the first year after law school. Many of them are already worried that it won’t be enough.”

— J.D. Vance

46. “These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance – the broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach.”

— J.D. Vance

47. “The list goes on. It’s impossible to know how many people believe one or many of these stories. But if a third of our community questions the president’s origin – despite all evidence to the contrary – it’s a good bet that the other conspiracies have broader currency than we’d like. This isn’t some libertarian mistrust of government policy, which is healthy in any democracy. This is deep skepticism of the very institutions of our society. And it’s becoming more and more mainstream.”

— J.D. Vance

48. “For kids like me, the part of the brain that deals with stress and conflict is always activated – the switch flipped indefinitely. We are constantly ready to fight or flee, because there is constant exposure to the bear, whether that bear is an alcoholic dad or an unhinged mom. We become hard-wired for conflict. And that wiring remains, even when there’s no more conflict to be had.”

— J.D. Vance

49. “We didn’t live a peaceful life in a small nuclear family. We lived a chaotic life in big groups of aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins. This was the life I’d been given, and I was a pretty happy kid.”

— J.D. Vance

50. “Mamaw always resented the hillbilly stereotype – the idea that our people were a bunch of slobbering morons. But the fact is that I was remarkably ignorant of how to get ahead. Not.”

— J.D. Vance