JD Vance Quotes

Mom’s brothers would come up and want to go carousing with Dad,” Uncle Jimmy explained. “They’d go drinking and chasing women. Uncle Pet was always the leader. I didn’t want to hear about it, but I always did. It was that culture from back then that expected the men were going to go out and do what they wanted to do.

"A good friend...once told me, "The best way to look at this might be to recognize that you probably can't fix these things. They'll always be around. But maybe you can put your thumb on the scale a little for the people at the margins" (238)."

So I think that any successful policy program would recognize what my old high school’s teachers see every day: that the real problem for so many of these kids is what happens (or doesn’t happen) at home.

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.

The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check. And since you’re fact-checking me, I think it’s important to say what’s actually going on.

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.

Your sister is the only true friend you'll ever have.

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

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.

social mobility isn’t just about money and economics, it’s about a lifestyle change. The wealthy and the powerful aren’t just wealthy and powerful; they follow a different set of norms and mores. When you go from working-class to professional-class, almost everything about your old life becomes unfashionable at best or unhealthy at worst.

Another lesson is that it’s not just our own communities that reinforce the outsider attitude, it’s the places and people that upward mobility connects us with — like my professor who suggested that Yale Law School shouldn’t accept applicants from non-prestigious state schools. There’s no way to quantify how these attitudes affect the working class. 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.

Fellow Christians, everyone is watching us when we apologize for this man. Lord help us.

it was my first indication that the policies of Mamaw’s “party of the working man” — the Democrats — weren’t all they were cracked up to be.

I don't think most Americans, whether they like her music, are fans of her or not, are going to be influenced by a billionaire celebrity who I think is fundamentally disconnected from their interests and the problems of most Americans.

I believe the devil is real and that he works terrible things in our society. That's a crazy conspiracy theory to a lot of very well-educated people in this country right now.