Quotes from J. D. Vance

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.

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.

I have been waiting for someone to come along and tap into that very real frustration that exists in a very large segment of the working-class Republican base. And no one had done it until Donald Trump. I very clearly saw a void, and I knew somebody would fill it. And the moment I knew he had filled it, I knew he would win the nomination.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The person in New York City is showing too little empathy for the Trump voter. The Trump voter is showing too little empathy for the person who's very worried about the refugee ban. They're not spending enough time with each other to have a meaningful conversation.

If it's hard for Blue America to see Red America as anything other than a bunch of dumb, racist rednecks; it's hard for Red America to recognize that many minorities are legitimately worried about what a Trump presidency means for their family.

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

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.

Not every town can or should be saved.

I never thought, when I was a kid, that there was a sense of competition or animosity towards poor blacks. I just thought there was a recognition that they lived differently - they primarily lived on the other side of town. And we're both poor, but that's kind of it. There wasn't much explicit statement of kinship or of the lack of kinship.

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.

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

I needed a lot of the good things that church provided. But as I grew older, it became increasingly hard for me to rationalize the importance of church in my life with the beliefs that it required that were at odds with modern science.

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

From the Marines, from Ohio State, from Yale, from other places, people have really stepped in and ensured that they filled that social capital gap that it was pretty obvious, apparently, that I had.