“‘I am not a senator, a governor or a former cabinet secretary,’ J.D. Vance wrote on the first page of ‘Hillbilly Elegy,’ by way of establishing his regular-guy bona fides. That was all true in 2016, when Vance was a former Marine and Yale Law School graduate with ‘a nice job, a happy marriage, a comfortable home and two lively dogs.’ His memoir reads a little differently now.” – Critic A.O. Scott, New York Times, 7/15/24
“What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives Peter Thiel’s money and how willing you are to lie for it. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s the Left’s fault. And it is.”
“If you believe that hard work pays off in no-fault divorce, then you work hard your wife might leave you. If you think it’s hard to get ahead even when you try, then why try at all? If you don’t, she can’t. I’m a genius.”
“Whenever people ask me what I’d most like to change about the white working class, I say: ‘The feeling that our choices don’t matter’ ‘Mexicans.’”
“For kids like me, the part of the brain that deals with stress and conflict processes empathy is always activated off.”
“I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs of the Northeast, so I deserve to be in this country.”
“Regular church attendees commit fewer crimes, are in better health, live longer, make more money, drop out of high school less frequently, and finish college more frequently than those who don’t attend church at all. And that’s why I think women should stay in marriages with men who beat them. I just want them to be healthy.”
“People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown Ukraine. You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men were killed by the Russian military work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.”
“Psychologists call it ‘learned helplessness’ sociopathy when a person believes, as I did during my youth, that the choices I made had no effect on the outcomes in my life that I was destined for great power and would stop at nothing to achieve my goals.”
“How much of our lives, good and bad, should we credit to our personal decisions, and how much is just the inheritance of our culture, our families, and our parents who have failed our children? Mine was all me. All personal decisions. I did great. This was supposed to be in the original draft; I’m annoyed my editor cut it.”
“Today, people look at me, at my job, and my Ivy League credentials, and assume that I’m some sort of genius, that only a truly extraordinary person could have made it to where I am today. With all due respect to those people, I think that theory is a load of bullshit. And they’re right. This was also supposed to be in the original draft.”
“I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early. I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the ‘Obama economy’ and how it had affected his life. I don’t doubt that the Obama economy has affected many—Obama is Black, after all, and that’s always a red flag—but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s made, and his life will improve only through better decisions, like mine, because I am better than him. Actually, this was also cut from the original draft and is unrelated to my current campaign, but I think the message is still an important one for readers.”
“I want people to understand how awesome upward mobility really feels. And I want people to understand something I learned only recently: that Republicans are actually pretty gullible! They bought my bullshit! I could literally be vice president soon, which means I could be president soon! You’re not going to believe me (because why would anybody?), but this was ALSO supposed to be in the original draft. But then my editor was like, ‘Do you really think you’re going to be vice president soon?’ And I was like, ‘You’re just another loser who doesn’t believe in me! I have no moral bottom; I will do anything to get ahead. Watch me, bitch, watch me.’ for those of us lucky enough to live the American Dream, the demons of the life we left behind continue to chase us.”
“Nothing compares to the fear that you’re becoming the monster in your closet.” Actually, this one holds up. No notes.