J. D. Vance Quotes

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

"At a pivotal time in my life, Barack Obama gave me hope that a boy who grew up like me could still achieve the most important of my dreams. For that, I'll miss him and the example he set."

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

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

"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."

"There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day."

"My fear with Trump was always that he didn't have great solutions."

"Airing the family's laundry can make people upset."

"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."

"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."

"Not every town can or should be saved."

"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."

"The military is arguably the most significant social institution in our country."

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

"I have never felt out of place in my entire life. But I did at Yale."

"I believe that I'm a hillbilly in my values and in my attitudes, and I don't want to lose that. I think it's possible to maintain a big chunk of that identity so long as you're self-reflective and meaningful about it."

"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."

"It's very hard to be a practicing Christian in the 21st-century world if you set things up as, 'Everyone is against us. You can't believe modern science, modern media or modern political institutions because they're all conspiring against Christians.'"

"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."

"I don't think that the Left has a monopoly on bad ideas. I don't think the Right has a monopoly on good ideas."

"My grandma - we called her Mamaw - loved her country."

"Mr. Trump, like too much of the church, offers little more than an excuse to project complex problems onto simple villains. Yet the white working class needs neither more finger-pointing nor more fiery sermons."

"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."

"I've always just felt a little out of place. I still feel out of place in San Francisco. It's this place where everything is going great, and everyone feels super optimistic about the world. It's a little different about how I grew up."

"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."

"Trump talks like a guy at a bar in West Virginia. Trump talks like my dad sitting around the dinner table."

"The increasing segregation we have in our country geographically and culturally has led to these pretty monolithic views of different classes of people, and because of that, we've lost a certain amount of cultural cohesion."

"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."

"Faith gave me the belief that there was somebody looking out for me, that there was a hopeful future on the other side of all the things I was going through."