Top 250 J.D. Vance Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 2 of 6

51. “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

52. “My primary duty was to lift the floor tile onto a shipping pallet and prepare that pallet for departure. It wasn’t easy, but it paid thirteen dollars an hour and I needed the money, so I took the job and collected as many overtime shifts and extra hours as I could.”

— J.D. Vance

53. “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

54. “In my worst moments, I convince myself that there is no exit, and no matter how much I fight old demons, they are as much an inheritance as my blue eyes and brown hair.”

— J.D. Vance

55. “The most depressing part is that relationship instability, like home chaos, is a vicious cycle. As sociologists Paula Fornby and Andrew Cherlin found, a “growing body of literature suggests that children who experience multiple transitions in family structure may fare worse developmentally than children raised in stable two-parent families and perhaps even than children raised in stable, single-parent families.” For.”

— 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. “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

58. “The theology she taught was unsophisticated, but it provided a message I needed to hear. To coast through life was to squander my God-given talent, so I had to work hard. I had to take care of my family because Christian duty demanded it. I needed to forgive, not just for my mother’s sake but for my own. I should never despair, for God had a plan. Mamaw.”

— J.D. Vance

59. “This is just one version of how the world of successful people actually works. But social capital is all around us. Those who tap into it and use it prosper. Those who don’t are running life’s race with a major handicap. This is a serious problem for kids like me.”

— J.D. Vance

60. “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

61. “The old adage says that it’s better to be lucky than good. Apparently having the right network is better than both.”

— J.D. Vance

62. “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

63. “God helps those who help themselves. This was the wisdom of the Book of Mamaw.”

— J.D. Vance

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “No person’s childhood gives him or her a perpetual moral get-out-of-jail-free card – not Lindsay, not Aunt Wee, not me, and not Mom.”

— J.D. Vance

68. “Section 8 vouchers ought to be administered in a way that doesn’t segregate the poor into little enclaves.”

— J.D. Vance

69. “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

70. “I’m not arguing that we deserve more sympathy than other folks. This is not a story about why white people have more to complain about than black people or any other group. That said, I do hope that readers of this book will be able to take from it an appreciation of how class and family affect the poor without filtering their views through a racial prism.”

— J.D. Vance

71. “There were two kinds of people: those whom I’d behave around because I wanted to impress them and those whom I’d behave around to avoid embarrassing myself. The latter people were outsiders, and Kentucky had none of them.”

— J.D. Vance

72. “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

73. “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

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

— J.D. Vance

75. “Thrift is inimical to our being. We spend to pretend that we’re upper-class.”

— J.D. Vance

76. “I didn’t want to hurt Mom’s feelings, but the past had created rifts that would likely never go away. I never confronted these demands head-on. I never explained to Mom that no matter how nice and caring she was at any given time – and while I had mono, she couldn’t have been a better mother – I just felt uncomfortable around her.”

— J.D. Vance

77. “Not all of the white working class struggles. I knew even as a child that there were two separate sets of mores and social pressures. My grandparents embodied one type: old-fashioned, quietly faithful, self-reliant, hardworking. My mother and, increasingly, the entire neighborhood embodied another: consumerist, isolated, angry, distrustful. There.”

— J.D. Vance

78. “In France, the percentage of children exposed to three or more maternal partners is 0.5 percent – about one in two hundred. The second highest share is 2.6 percent, in Sweden, or about one in forty. In the United States, the figure is a shocking 8.2 percent – about one in twelve – and the figure is even higher in the working class.”

— J.D. Vance

79. “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

80. “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

81. “For there are no villains in this story. There’s just a ragtag band of hillbillies struggling to find their way – both for their sake and, by the grace of God, for mine.”

— J.D. Vance

82. “I almost failed out of high school.”

— J.D. Vance

83. “Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault. My dad, for example, has never disparaged hard work, but he mistrusts some of the most obvious paths to upward mobility. When.”

— J.D. Vance

84. “The trials of my youth instilled a debilitating self-doubt. Instead of congratulating myself on having overcome some obstacles, I worried that I’d be overcome by the next ones.”

— J.D. Vance

85. “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

86. “Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it – not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right.”

— J.D. Vance

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

— J.D. Vance

88. “He taught me that lack of knowledge and lack of intelligence were not the same.”

— J.D. Vance

89. “Religious folks are much happier. Regular church attendees commit fewer crimes, are in better health, live longer, make more money, drop out of high school less frequently, and finish college more frequently than those who don’t attend church at all.16.”

— J.D. Vance

90. “My dad, for example, has never disparaged hard work, but he mistrusts some of the most obvious paths to upward mobility. When he found out that I had decided to go to Yale Law, he asked whether, on my applications, I had “pretended to be black or liberal.” This is how low the cultural expectations of working-class white Americans have fallen.”

— J.D. Vance

91. “We didn’t have cell phones, and we didn’t have nice clothes, but Mamaw made sure that I had one of those graphing calculators. This taught me an important lesson about Mamaw’s values, and it forced me to engage with school in a way I never had before.”

— J.D. Vance

92. “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. What.”

— J.D. Vance

93. “As a cultural emigrant from one group to the other, I am acutely aware of their differences. 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 I have to give it to them: Their children are happier and healthier, their divorce rates lower, their church attendance higher, their lives longer. These people are beating us at our own damned game. I.”

— J.D. Vance

94. “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

95. “I could live with my grandparents whenever I wished. Mom would officially retain custody, but from that day forward I lived in her house only when I chose to – and Mamaw told me that if Mom had a problem with the arrangement, she could talk to the barrel of Mamaw’s gun. This was hillbilly justice, and it didn’t fail me.”

— J.D. Vance

96. “I had no idea how to deal with relationship problems, so I chose not to deal with them at all.”

— J.D. Vance

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

— J.D. Vance

98. “The only thing that report proves is that many folks talk about working more than they actually work. Of.”

— J.D. Vance

99. “But there’s something powerful about realizing that you’ve undersold yourself – that somehow your mind confused lack of effort for inability. This is why, 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

100. “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