Top 250 J.D. Vance Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

3. “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

4. “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

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

— J.D. Vance

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

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

— J.D. Vance

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

— J.D. Vance

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

— J.D. Vance

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

— J.D. Vance

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

— J.D. Vance

14. “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

15. “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

16. “Seeing people insult, scream and sometimes physically fight was just a part of our life. After a while, you didn’t even notice it.”

— J.D. Vance

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

— J.D. Vance

18. “In the middle of the Bible Belt, active church attendance is actually quite low.”

— J.D. Vance

19. “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

20. “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

21. “This is the reality of our community. It’s about a naked druggie destroying what little of value exists in her life. It’s about children who lose their toys and clothes to a mother’s addiction.”

— J.D. Vance

22. “I just wanted reassurance. “Mamaw, does God love us?” She hung her head, gave me a hug, and began to cry.”

— J.D. Vance

23. “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

24. “William Julius Wilson called The Truly Disadvantaged, struck.”

— J.D. Vance

25. “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

26. “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

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. “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

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

— J.D. Vance

30. “Within two generations, the transplanted hillbillies had largely caught up to the native population in terms of income and poverty level.”

— J.D. Vance

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

34. “It was, Uncle Jimmy told me, ‘a typical middle-class life’. 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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “Yale Law School was like nerd Hollywood, and I never stopped feeling like an awestruck tourist.”

— J.D. Vance

39. “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

40. “Sometimes, honey, you have to fight, even when you’re not defending yourself. Sometimes it’s just the right thing to do.”

— J.D. Vance

41. “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

42. “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

43. “And what turned me into an alien was my optimism.”

— J.D. Vance

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

— J.D. Vance

45. “Change the names and dates, and the Italian Mafia starts to look a lot like the Hatfield-McCoy dispute back in Appalachia.”

— J.D. Vance

46. “In 1960, of Ohio’s ten million residents, one million were born in Kentucky, West Virginia, or Tennessee. This doesn’t count the large number of migrants from elsewhere in the southern Appalachian Mountains; nor does it include the children or grandchildren of migrants who were hill people to the core. There were undoubtedly many of these children and grandchildren, as hillbillies tended to have much higher birthrates than the native population.6.”

— J.D. Vance

47. “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

48. “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

49. “We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese. 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

50. “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