Top 250 J.D. Vance Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “The lesson? Powerful people sometimes do things to help people like me without really understanding people like me.”

— J.D. Vance

152. “Maybe, with my Southern drawl and.”

— J.D. Vance

153. “We rarely cook, even though it’s cheaper and better for the body and soul.”

— J.D. Vance

154. “Confederate soldiers.”

— J.D. Vance

155. “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

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

— J.D. Vance

157. “With little trust in the press, there’s no check on the Internet conspiracy theories that rule the digital world. Barack.”

— J.D. Vance

158. “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. Even more surprising, 42 percent of working-class whites – by far the highest number in the survey – report that their lives are less economically successful than those of their parents’.”

— J.D. Vance

159. “The problems of our community hit close to home. Mom’s struggles weren’t some isolated incident. They were replicated, replayed, and relived by many of the people who, like us, had moved hundreds of miles in search of a better life. There was no end in sight. Mamaw had thought she escaped the poverty of the hills, but the poverty – emotional, if not financial – had followed her.”

— J.D. Vance

160. “Our elegy is a sociological one, yes, but it is also about psychology and community and culture and faith. During.”

— J.D. Vance

161. “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

162. “Mamaw’s first foray into adulthood ended in tragedy. Today I often wonder: Without the baby, would she ever have left Jackson? Would she have run off with Jim Vance to foreign territory? Mamaw’s entire life – and the trajectory of our family – may have changed for a baby who lived only six days.”

— J.D. Vance

163. “The life I lead now was the stuff of fantasy during my childhood.”

— J.D. Vance

164. “Children with multiple ACEs are more likely to struggle with anxiety and depression, to suffer from heart disease and obesity, and to contract certain types of cancers. They’re also more likely to underperform in school and suffer from relationship instability as adults. Even excessive shouting can damage a kid’s sense of security and contribute to mental health and behavioral issues down the road. Harvard.”

— J.D. Vance

165. “There is no group of Americans more pessimistic than working-class whites.”

— J.D. Vance

166. “I’ve achieved something quite ordinary, which doesn’t happen to most kids who grow up like me.”

— J.D. Vance

167. “But whatever the reasons, the rhetoric of hard work conflicts with the reality on the ground. The.”

— J.D. Vance

168. “Their paper suggests that hillbillies learn from an early age to deal with uncomfortable truths by avoiding them, or by pretending better truths exist.”

— J.D. Vance

169. “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 of the picture, as they did in my case. Some states require occupational licensing for foster parents – just like nurses and doctors – even when the would-be foster parent is a grandmother or another close family member.”

— J.D. Vance

170. “The life I lead now was the stuff of fantasy during my childhood. So many people helped create that fantasy. At every level of my life and in every environment, I have found family and mentors and lifelong friends who supported and.”

— J.D. Vance

171. “The people are physically unhealthy, and without government assistance they lack treatment for the most basic problems. Most important, they’re mean about it – they will hesitate to open their lives up to others for the simple reason that they don’t wish to be judged.”

— J.D. Vance

172. “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

173. “We do know that working-class Americans aren’t just less likely to climb the economic ladder, they’re also more likely to fall off even after they’ve reached the top. I imagine that the discomfort they feel at leaving behind much of their identity plays at least a small role in this problem. One way our upper class can promote upward mobility, then, is not only by pushing wise public policies but by opening their hearts and minds to the newcomers who don’t quite belong. Though.”

— J.D. Vance

174. “Federal housing policy has actively encouraged homeownership, from Jimmy Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act to George W. Bush’s ownership society. But in the Middletowns of the world, homeownership comes at a steep social cost: As jobs disappear in a given area, declining home values trap people in certain neighborhoods. Even if you’d like to move, you can’t, because the bottom has fallen out of the market – you now owe more than any buyer is willing to pay.”

— J.D. Vance

175. “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 the real barrier to opportunity.”

— J.D. Vance

176. “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

177. “We tend to overstate and to understate, to glorify the good and ignore the bad in ourselves.”

— J.D. Vance

178. “The number of working-class whites in high-poverty neighborhoods is growing. In 1970, 25 percent of white children lived in a neighborhood with poverty rates above 10 percent. In 2000, that number was 40 percent. It’s almost certainly even higher today. As a 2011 Brookings Institution study found, “compared to 2000, residents of extreme-poverty neighborhoods in 2005–09 were more likely to be white, native-born, high.”

— J.D. Vance

179. “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

180. “The moms and dads and grandparents didn’t wear suits like the lawyers and judge. They wore sweatpants and stretchy pants and T-shirts. Their hair was a bit frizzy. And it was the first time I noticed “TV accents” – the neutral accent that so many news anchors had. The social workers and the judge and the lawyer all had TV accents. None of us did. The people who ran the courthouse were different from us. The people subjected to it were not.”

— J.D. Vance

181. “This has occurred for complicated reasons. Federal housing policy has actively encouraged homeownership, from Jimmy Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act to George W. Bush’s ownership society.”

— J.D. Vance

182. “At around that time, our neighbor – one of Mamaw and Papaw’s oldest friends – registered the house next to ours for Section 8. Section 8 is a government program that offers low-income residents a.”

— J.D. Vance

183. “As I increasingly saw Mom’s behavior in myself, I tried to understand her.”

— J.D. Vance

184. “But experience can be a difficult teacher, and it taught me that this story of economic insecurity is, at best, incomplete.”

— J.D. Vance

185. “The people who ran the courthouse were different from us. The people subjected to it were not. Identity.”

— J.D. Vance

186. “Chad Berry in his book Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles, “the.”

— J.D. Vance

187. “Papaw wasn’t ideal company for a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl with an active social life. Thus, she took advantage of him in the same way that every young girl takes advantage of a father: She loved and admired him, she asked him for things that he sometimes gave her, and she didn’t pay him a lot of attention when she was around her friends. To.”

— J.D. Vance

188. “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.”

— J.D. Vance

189. “Papaw was a Democrat because that party protected the working people.”

— J.D. Vance

190. “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

191. “But there’s something powerful about realizing that you’ve undersold yourself – that somehow your mind confused lack of effort for inability.”

— J.D. Vance

192. “Children with multiple ACEs are more likely to struggle with anxiety and depression, to suffer from heart disease and obesity, and to contract certain types of cancers. They’re also more likely to underperform in school and suffer from relationship instability as adults.”

— J.D. Vance

193. “But this book is about something else: what goes on in the lives of real people when the industrial economy goes south. It’s about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible. It’s about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it. The.”

— J.D. Vance

194. “He finished his food quickly and then nervously looked from person to person. I could tell that he wanted to ask a question, so I wrapped my arm around his shoulder and asked if he needed anything. ‘Yeah,’ he started, refusing to make eye contact. And then, almost in a whisper: ‘I wonder if I could get a few more french fries.’ He was hungry – in 2014, in the richest country on Earth. He wanted a little extra to eat, but felt uncomfortable asking.”

— J.D. Vance

195. “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. Even the best and brightest will likely go to college close to home, if they survive the war zone in their own home. “I don’t care if you got into Notre Dame,” we say. “You can get a fine, cheap education at the community college.” The irony is that for poor people like us, an.”

— J.D. Vance

196. “Your generation will make its living with their minds, not their hands,” he once told me. The only acceptable career at Armco was as an engineer, not as a laborer in the weld shop. A lot of other Middletown parents and grandparents must have felt similarly: 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.”

— J.D. Vance

197. “Even excessive shouting can damage a kid’s sense of security and contribute to mental health and behavioral issues down the road.”

— J.D. Vance

198. “This is really striking – four in every ten working-class people had faced multiple instances of childhood trauma. For the non–working class, that number was 29 percent.”

— J.D. Vance

199. “As Papaw knew when he was a young man, the best way up for the hillbilly was out.”

— J.D. Vance

200. “As a 2011 Brookings Institution study found, “compared to 2000, residents of extreme-poverty neighborhoods in 2005–09 were more likely to be white, native-born, high school or college graduates, homeowners, and not receiving public assistance.”12.”

— J.D. Vance