126 Quotes by J. D. Vance

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.

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.

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 te real barrior to opportunity.

Of course, the reasons poor people aren’t working as much as others are complicated, and it’s too easy to blame the problem on laziness. For many, part-time work is all they have access to, and their skills don’t fit well in the modern economy. But whatever the reasons, the rhetoric of hard work conflicts with the reality on the ground. The kids in Middletown absorb that conflict and struggle with it.

I learned little else about what masculinity required of me other than drinking beer and screaming at a woman when she screamed at you. In the end, the only lesson that took was that you can’t depend on people. “I learned that men will disappear at the drop of a hat,” Lindsay [his half-sister] once said. “They don’t care about their kids; they don’t provide; they just disappear, and it’s not that hard to make them go.

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

My grandma always had two gods: Jesus Christ and the United States of America. I was no different, and neither was anyone else I knew.

I went to Yale to earn a law degree. But that first year at Yale taught me most of all that I didn't know how the world of the American elite works.

Church attendance rates among white Americans without a college education have dropped pretty significantly. People with college degrees are more likely to go to church than people without college degrees among the white working class.