Top 250 J.D. Vance Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet.”

— J.D. Vance

62. “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

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

— J.D. Vance

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

— J.D. Vance

65. “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

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

— J.D. Vance

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

72. “The same was true of Charles Murray’s seminal Losing Ground, another book about black folks that could have been written about hillbillies – which addressed the way our government encouraged social decay through the welfare state.”

— J.D. Vance

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “When Mamaw picked me up from school, I’d ask her not to get out of the car lest my friends see her – wearing her uniform of baggy jeans and a men’s T-shirt – with a giant menthol cigarette hanging from her lip. When people asked, I lied and told them that I lived with my mom, that she and I took care of my ailing grandmother. Even today, I still regret that far too many high school friends and acquaintances never knew Mamaw was the best thing that ever happened to me. My.”

— J.D. Vance

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

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

— J.D. Vance

83. “Part of the problem is how state laws define the family. For families like mine – and for many black and Hispanic families – grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles play an outsize role. Child services often cut them out.”

— J.D. Vance

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

87. “Efforts to reinvent downtown Middletown always struck me as futile. 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

88. “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

89. “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

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

— J.D. Vance

91. “I’m not saying ability doesn’t matter. It certainly helps. 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.” The Marine Corps excised that feeling like a surgeon does a tumor. A.”

— J.D. Vance

92. “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

93. “For there are no villains in this story.”

— J.D. Vance

94. “And a young man with every reason to work – a wife-to-be to support and a baby on the way – carelessly tossing aside a good job with excellent health insurance. More troublingly, when it was all over, he thought something had been done to him. 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. This is distinct from the larger economic landscape of modern America. It’s.”

— J.D. Vance

95. “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

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

— J.D. Vance

97. “Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t.”

— J.D. Vance

98. “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

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

— J.D. Vance

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

— J.D. Vance