J. D. Vance Quotes

I make films about working class people.

The causes of crime are very complicated. But there is a very big literature, as you know, about single parenthood in crime, about race in crime, and about poverty in crime.

When I was young, I grew up in a family of working-class people. Not just my parents, but my extended family, as well.

While unions did not play a part in my family life when I was being brought up, my early years were most certainly spent in a working-class community.

My sympathies have always been for working-class people.

I'm a working-class person, working with class.

And understand: class differences will not save you.

I feel sometimes that there's this sense that people are poor because they want to be, or they're working-class because they want to be or because they don't work hard enough. I feel like there's this demonization of working people in general, but specifically definitely labor union members.

The working class is my home country, and my future is linked with the proletariat.

I could actually care less about the poor. We have some living near us, and pee-yew. They are always coming and going to their three or four jobs at all hours of the day and night. Annoying!

In Britain, by contrast, we still think that class plays a part in determining a person's life chances, so we're less inclined to celebrate success and less inclined to condemn failure. The upshot is that it's much easier to be a failure in Britain than it is in America.

The working-class aspirations are worse now than when I was a kid - and it was pretty bad when I was a kid. Reality TV means they are being told they are no longer a working class, they're an underclass. Young lassies want to be Jordan or Jade, but very few aspire to be the next Germaine Greer.

Obviously, personal responsibility is important. But there's no evidence that people who are poor are less ambitious than anyone else. In fact, many work long hours at backbreaking jobs.

People like me who grew up in a working-class town, who don't have a college education, you don't usually hear from us.

I have a visceral response to a memory of working-class life.

The working poor is a growing population in this country.

The working class is very under-represented in politics, literature, and everywhere else.

Among poor people, there's not any question about women being strong -- even stronger than men -- they work in the fields right along with the men. When your survival is at stake, you don't have these questions about yourself like middle-class women do.

It would be well for those interested to reflect whether there now exists, or ever has existed, a wealthy and civilized community in which one portion did not live on the labor of another.... Remember that labor is the only source of wealth, and how small a portion of it, in all old and civilized countries, even the best governed, is left to those by whose labor wealth is created.

We will not adopt the fantastic hypocrisy of modern conservatism which preaches the values of families and communities, while conducting a direct assault on them through reduced wages and conditions and job security.

The labor movement was ill-equipped to deal with the new inequalities arising almost inevitably from the less secure, part time and low paid nature of women’s occupations.

With industrialization the gulf between the employed and the employer is growing wider; social contrasts are becoming sharper—as liveried carriages appear, so do barefoot children.

But the way I look at it is just about every profession in our society: There's some lasting effects. It's just the way that our society is set up. People have to work.

I'm not running from the left; I'm running from the bottom. I'm running in fierce advocacy for working-class New Yorkers.

My family wasn't involved in the college. They were more of just your 'white trash' kind of family. And so I have that kind of background, but I always kind of aspired to be something else, and I made a lot of different friends over the years that were passing through.