J.D. Vance

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

— J.D. Vance

“I’m the kind of patriot whom people on the Acela corridor laugh at.”

— J.D. Vance

“friend. Besides Tina, the person who deserves the”

— J.D. Vance

“Maybe, with my Southern drawl and”

— J.D. Vance

“It’s impossible to say whether I would have gotten the job. I was”

— J.D. Vance

“My professor gave me permission to be me. It’s”

— J.D. Vance

“As I began to think a bit more deeply about my own identity, I”

— J.D. Vance

“So maybe I just wanted to give credit where credit is due.”

— J.D. Vance

“The articles read like radiator manuals—dry, formulaic, and partially written in another language. (A”

— J.D. Vance

“I had no idea how to deal with relationship problems, so I chose not to deal with them at all.”

— J.D. Vance

“Within two generations, the transplanted hillbillies had largely caught up to the native population in terms of income and poverty level.”

— J.D. Vance

“If you believe that hard work pays off, then you work hard; if you think it’s hard to get ahead even when…

— J.D. Vance

“Change the names and dates, and the Italian Mafia starts to look a lot like the Hatfield-McCoy dispute back in Appalachia.”

— J.D. Vance

“Many in the white working class believe the worst about their society.”

— J.D. Vance

“All of us were poor, and no amount of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles memorabilia would change that”

— J.D. Vance

“the measure of a man is how he treats the women in his family.” His wisdom came from experience,”

— J.D. Vance

“She didn’t just preach and cuss and demand. She showed me what was possible—a peaceful Sunday afternoon with the people I loved—and…

— J.D. Vance

“Mamaw always resented the hillbilly stereotype—the idea that our people were a bunch of slobbering morons. But the fact is that I…

— J.D. Vance

“However you want to define these two groups and their approach to giving—rich and poor; educated and uneducated; upper-class and working-class—their members…

— J.D. Vance

“the measure of a man is how he treats the women in his family.” His wisdom came from experience, from his own…

— J.D. Vance

“I believe we hillbillies are the toughest goddamned people on this earth. We take an electric saw to the hide of those…

— J.D. Vance

“I want people to understand something I learned only recently: that for those of us lucky enough to live the American Dream,…

— J.D. Vance

“It was, Uncle Jimmy told me, 'a typical middle-class life'. Kind of boring, by some standards, but happy in a way you…

— J.D. Vance

“The same was true of Charles Murray’s seminal Losing Ground, another book about black folks that could have been written about hillbillies—which…

— J.D. Vance

“there is enormous value in what economists call social capital. It’s a professor’s term, but the concept is pretty simple: The networks…

— J.D. Vance

“But as I realized that in this new world I was the culture alien, I began to think seriously about questions that…

— J.D. Vance

“There is no group of Americans more pessimistic than working-class whites. Well over half of blacks, Latinos, and college-educated whites expect that…

— J.D. Vance

“Each time someone stole a bike from our porch (three times, by my count), or broke into her car and took the…

— J.D. Vance

“I knew even as a child that there were two separate sets of mores and social pressures. My grandparents embodied one type:…

— J.D. Vance

“Social capital isn’t manifest only in someone connecting you to a friend or passing a résumé on to an old boss. It…

— J.D. Vance

“year-old J.D. Vance would have considered ludicrous. But about two hundred people do the same thing every year, and trust me, you…

— J.D. Vance

“There was, and still is, a sense that those who make it are of two varieties. The first are lucky: They come…

— J.D. Vance

“tried to go to a counselor, but it was just too weird. Talking to some stranger about my feelings made me want…

— J.D. Vance

“As one observer noted, “In traveling across America, the Scots-Irish have consistently blown my mind as far and away the most persistent…

— J.D. Vance

“It was not simply that the Appalachian migrants, as rural strangers ‘out of place’ in the city, were upsetting to Midwestern, urban…

— J.D. Vance

“Mamaw and Papaw taught me that we live in the best and greatest country on earth. This fact gave meaning to my…

— J.D. Vance

“Dad denies ever physically abusing anyone, including Mom. I suspect that they were physically abusive to each other in the way that…

— J.D. Vance

“Drug addiction was a disease, and just as I wouldn’t judge a cancer patient for a tumor, so I shouldn’t judge a…

— J.D. Vance

“If Mamaw's second God was the United States of America, then many people in my community were losing something akin to a…

— J.D. Vance

“Consider my life before I moved in with Mamaw. In the middle of third grade, we left Middletown and my grandparents to…

— J.D. Vance