J.D. Vance Quotes

The measure of a man is how he treats the women in his family.

For there are no villains in this story.

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

My parents' mistakes were not my fault, so I had no reason to hide them.

Lindsay was a teenager...at the height of that weird mixture of thinking you know everything and caring too much about how others perceive you.

It's about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.

Kind of boring, by some standards, but happy in a way you appreciate only when you understand the consequences of not being boring.

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.

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

that report proves is that many folks talk about working more than they actually work. Of

We choose not to work when we should be looking for jobs.

The lesson? Powerful people sometimes do things to help people like me without really understanding people like me.

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

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

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

But yeah, like everyone else in our family, they could go from zero to murderous in a fucking heartbeat.

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.

ACEs happen everywhere, in every community. But studies have shown that ACEs are far more common in my corner of the demographic world. A

The wealthy and the powerful aren't just wealthy and powerful; they follow a different set of norms and mores.

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.

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

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

Public policy can help, but there is no government that can fix these problems for us. Recall

In other words, bad neighborhoods no longer plague only urban ghettos; the bad neighborhoods have spread to the suburbs. This

...Mom equated money with affection...but I never cared about the money. I just wanted her to be healthy.

He was hungry. IN 2014, in the richest country on earth, he wanted a little extra to eat but felt uncomfortable asking. Lord help us.

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

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

I've never heard anyone else called "the nicest person in the world." For Gail, it's an entirely deserved title.

believe that hard work pays off, then you work hard; if you think it's hard to get ahead even when you try, then why try at all? Similarly,

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.

Never be like these fucking losers who think the deck is stacked against them," my grandma often told me. "You can do anything you want to." Their

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

But I often wonder: Where would I be without them? I think

...I had an acute sense that the walls were closing in on "real" Christians... For the first time in my life, I felt like a persecuted minority.

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

Nothing compares to the fear that you're becoming the monster in your closet. During

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.

Hillbilly culture at the time (and maybe now) blended a robust sense of honor, devotion to family, and bizarre sexism into a sometimes explosive mix.

The old adage says that it's better to be lucky than good. Apparently having the right network is better than both. At

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

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

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

As we talked, I noticed little quirks that few others would. He didn't want to share his milk shake, which

the real problem for so many of these kids is what happens (or doesn't happen) at home.

...bad neighborhoods no longer plague only urban ghettos; the bad neighborhoods have spread to the suburbs.