J. D. Vance

My military service is the thing I'm most proud of, but when I think of everything happening in the Middle East, I can't help but tell myself I wish we would have achieved some sort of lasting victory. No one touched that subject before Trump, especially not in the Republican Party.

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.

In some ways, Trump's large, national coalition defies easy characterization. He draws from a broad base of good people: kind folks who open their homes and hearts to people of all colors and creeds, married couples with happy homes and families who live nearby, public servants who put their lives on the line to fight fires in their communities.

For complicated historical and political reasons, we associate 'poor' in our public consciousness with 'black.' Terms such as 'welfare queen' and 'culture of poverty' became associated uniquely with the social maladies of African Americans in urban ghettos, despite the fact that poor whites outnumbered poor blacks.

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

The most depressing part of the 2016 election is that the candidates often failed to show any cultural leadership: any recognition that the world of public policy was important but hardly the only good and necessary part of our shared society.

If you think about what folks have been doing for 20 or 30 years, they have been bottling frustration and resentment that the political elites don't understand them, that the political elites don't care about them, that the political elites judge them in various ways. All Donald Trump does is provide the opposite of those things.

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

We need to ask questions about how we're going to give low-income kids who come from a broken home access to a loving home.

There are definitely some folks in my hometown who are unhappy with the way I portrayed my hometown... But I think most folks realize I wrote this book not to disparage the hometown but to really try to understand why so many kids who grew up like I did struggled.

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.

It would be great if people returned to areas of the country that need talented people with good economic prospects. Our country would really benefit if those who went to elite universities, who started businesses, who started nonprofits, weren't just doing so on the coasts.