Top 75 J. D. Vance Quotes

We need to think about how we teach working-class children about not just hard skills, like reading and mathematics, but also soft skills, like conflict resolution and financial management.

I eventually got to the point where I was like, ‘Well, if I can’t believe in the Big Bang Theory and be a good Christian, then maybe I’m not a good Christian.’

The factories that moved overseas used to provide not just high-paying jobs but also a sense of purpose and community.

Stanford’s law school application wasn’t the standard combination of college transcript, LSAT score, and essays. It required a personal sign-off from the dean of your college: You had to submit a form, completed by the dean, attesting that you weren’t a loser.

I do think that tonal element of Trump’s is attractive, but I don’t know if I would go so far as to say the confrontational element of his rhetoric is necessarily attractive.

Undoubtedly, church fish fries and picnics help build social cohesion. It was at my dad’s medium-size evangelical church – my first real exposure to a sustained religious community – that I first saw people of different races and classes worshiping together.

We think of the Marine Corps as a military outfit, and of course it is, but for me, the U.S. Marine Corps was a four-year crash course in character education. It taught me how to make a bed, how to do laundry, how to wake up early, how to manage my finances. These are things my community didn’t teach me.

During my first round of law school applications, I didn’t even apply to Yale, Harvard, or Stanford – the mystical ‘top three’ schools. I didn’t think I had a chance at those places. More important, I didn’t think it mattered; all lawyers get good jobs, I assumed.

I never wanted to be a public intellectual or a talking head.

I used to go on chat rooms on AOL, back when those things existed, and argue with believers in evolution and argued with them that it was against God’s law to believe in evolution. It was something I believed really personally.

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

When you write a book, and you argue a problem is complicated and multidimensional, it’s very easy to read a slice of that book and say, ‘Well, this is the part that either confirms or really challenges my biases, so that’s what I’m going to say the entire book is about.’

Every two weeks, I’d get a small pay-check and notice the line where federal and state income taxes were deducted from my wages. At least as often, our drug-addict neighbor would buy T-bone steaks, which I was too poor to buy for myself but was forced by Uncle Sam to buy for someone else.

Airing the family’s laundry can make people upset.

When people read ‘Breitbart’ every single day and convince themselves that Barack Obama is a foreign terrorist, that is not a problem of government. That is a problem of community failure, and we have to recognize that.

We are so isolated in our own little worlds, in our own little geographies, that it’s pretty hard to understand where someone else is coming from. And so I think that we have to really think about what that means as a country and, frankly, whether this segregation that we have is durable over the long run.

I am proud of my service and proud of those who served alongside me. But war is about more than service and sacrifice – it’s about winning.

I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off government largesse enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about.

Anger about the wars isn’t the only reason voters support Mr. Trump. But his willingness to say what other G.O.P. candidates won’t reflects what people like most about him: his complete break with the party elite.

I happen to be a conservative, but one need not accept the Right’s theories wholesale to acknowledge the sometimes negative effects of government action on health care.

At a person-to-person level, I think that there’s always something to be said for having some empathy for the folks who really, really disagree with you about a given topic.

Solutions are complex, and I continue to worry that Trump didn’t fully appreciate the complexity of what’s going on. Consequently, I worry about whether he’s going to make the problems a whole lot better… But I am a Republican, and we really should give the guy a chance to govern and hope he’s successful.

For decades, scholars have studied the ways in which implicit biases affect how we perceive other people in this multiethnic society of ours. The data consistently shows that about 90 percent of us possess some implicit prejudices – and, unsurprisingly, people typically favor their own group.

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.

I think what Trump will be judged on by the folks that voted for him… is whether things start to get a little bit better over the next few years. And ultimately, that doesn’t depend on whether Jeff Sessions is the attorney general.

What unites Trump’s voters is a sense of alienation from America’s wealthy and powerful.

While faith need not be monolithic – it can motivate both voting behavior and character development – focus matters. A Christianity constantly looking for political answers to moral and spiritual problems gives believers an excuse to blame other people when they should be looking in the mirror.

On my first day at Yale Law School, there were posters in the hallways announcing an event with Tony Blair, the former British prime minister. I couldn’t believe it: Tony Blair was speaking to a room of a few dozen students? If he came to Ohio State, he would have filled an auditorium of a thousand people.

I once interviewed my grandma for a class project about the Second World War. After 70 years filled with marriage, children, grandchildren, death, poverty and triumph, the thing about which she was unquestionably the proudest and most excited was that she and her family did their part during the war.

The sometimes-tough love of the Christian faith of my childhood demanded a certain amount of self-reflection and, occasionally, self-criticism.

Hillbillies learn from an early age to deal with uncomfortable truths by avoiding them or by pretending better truths exist. This tendency might make for psychological resilience, but it also makes it hard for Appalachians to look at themselves honestly.

Church gives people a sense of community, a sense of how to behave… social support when times get tough. In a world where white working class folks are going to church less and less, they’re losing that when they might really need it.

I almost failed out of high school. I nearly gave in to the deep anger and resentment harbored by everyone around me… Whatever talents I have, I almost squandered until a handful of loving people rescued me.

I’m not one of these people who thinks I know all the answers.

Liberals have to get more comfortable with dealing with the poor as they actually are. I admire their refusal to look down on the least among us, but at some level, that can become an excuse to never really look at the problem at all.

Folks like me have to feel a little indebted to the communities that they came from. And if they do, I think we’ll start to see a little bit more of a geographic integration in the country because people will start to think, ‘You know what? I owe that place something, and I should return to it in one form or another.’

We need to ask questions about how we’re going to give low-income kids who come from a broken home access to a loving home.

One of the things that concerns me is that so few people who go and get an education elsewhere… feel any real… pull for returning home.

There are definitely some folks in my hometown who are unhappy with the way I portrayed my hometown… But I think most folks realize I wrote this book not to disparage the hometown but to really try to understand why so many kids who grew up like I did struggled.

The idea that working a blue-collar job and living in a working-class community provides barriers that are unique to your circumstances – that’s not a very controversial subject anymore. I think it’s something that people on both the Left and the Right probably accept.

Policies that promote better wages and better jobs would be super-helpful, and I’m a big fan of programs that encourage people to go where jobs are.

As a culture, working-class white Americans like myself had no heroes. We loved the military but had no George S. Patton figure in the modern army. I doubt my neighbours could even name a high-ranking military officer.

The transition after the Vietnam War to an all-volunteer force created the world’s finest professional military. But it also reinforced geographic and cultural divisions that reveal themselves in our voting.

People have lost their faith that if they work hard, if they try to get ahead, if they play by the rules, then that will ultimately result in positive outcomes.

To serve in the modern military – or to be the uncle, parent or sibling of one who does – is to treat the necessary service and sacrifice of war with a sacred honor. In my community, we pile into cars and drive hundreds of miles to watch our children’s graduation from basic training.