J. D. Vance

Author

1984-08-02

Quotes by J. D. Vance

• Politicians of both parties told us that free trade with Asia and Latin America would spur economic growth, and maybe it did somewhere else. In our towns, though, factories continue shutting down or moving overseas.

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• It's hard to strike that balance: to tell a kid that life isn't fair, but also recognize and enforce in them the reality that their choices matter.

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• 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.

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• The subsidy for employer-sponsored coverage has tethered health care to employment in a way that virtually no economist endorses.

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• My grandma would say if someone else calls you a hillbilly, you might need to punch them in the nose. But if we call ourselves hillbillies, it's a sort of a term of endearment, something that we have co-opted.

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• It's amazing to think how powerful of a force optimism and hope can be. It's the thing that saves me. I believed that I lived in the greatest country in the world. I still believe that, and consequently, I believed that I had a chance, even though things around me were absolutely crazy and difficult.

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• We spend our way to the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don't need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being.

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• Trump brings power to those who hate their lack of it, and his message is tonic to communities that have felt nothing but decline for decades.

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• 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.

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• Not every town can or should be saved.

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• The regulatory approach of the Food and Drug Administration and the Patent and Trademark Office has driven up the costs of generic drugs.

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

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• Trump's biggest failure as a political leader is that he sees the worst in people, and he encourages the worst in people.

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• 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.

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• Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation's highest office.

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• 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.

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• We spend to pretend that we're upper class. And when the dust clears - when bankruptcy hits or a family member bails us out of our stupidity - there's nothing left over. Nothing for the kids' college tuition, no investment to grow our wealth, no rainy-day fund if someone loses her job.

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• If you had looked at my life when I was 14 years old and said, 'Well, what's going to happen to this kid?' you would have concluded that I would have struggled with what academics call upward mobility.

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• It seems to me an indictment of the Republican Party that if you talk about issues of poverty and upward mobility, people assume you're a Democrat.

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• We watch our sons go to war, disagree with the rationale for sending them, loathe the men who ordered them to battle, and then, when the veterans come home, beg and plead with the local V.A. to ensure they have access to proper care.

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