James Howard Kunstler famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

I like to call it 'the national automobile slum.' You can call it suburban sprawl. I think it's appropriate to call it the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.
-- James Howard Kunstler

#Motivation #Inspiration #Thinking
As the places where Americans dwell become evermore depressing and impossible, Disneyworld is where they escape to worship the nation in the abstract, a cartoon capital of a cartoon republic enshrining the falsehoods, half-truths, and delusions that prop up the squishy thing the national character has become--for instance, that we are a nation of families; that we care about our fellow citizens; that history matters; that there is a place called home.
-- James Howard Kunstler

#Depressing #Home #Character
America does not want change, except from the cash register at Wal-Mart.
-- James Howard Kunstler

#America #Doe #Cash
Suburbia is the insidious cartoon of the country house in a cartoon of the country.
-- James Howard Kunstler

#Country #House #Cartoon
I don't like talking about 'solutions.' I prefer talking about intelligent responses.
-- James Howard Kunstler

#Intelligent #Talking #Response
Suburbia is not going to run on biodiesel. The easy-motoring tourist industry is not going to run on biodiesel, wind power and solar fuel.
-- James Howard Kunstler

#Running #Wind #Tourists
When a society is stressed, when it comes up against things that are hard to understand, you get a lot of delusional thinking.
-- James Howard Kunstler

#Thinking #Stressed #Delusional
Americans are suffering so much from being in unrewarding environments that it has made us very cynical. I think that American suburbia has become a powerful generator of anxiety and depression.
-- James Howard Kunstler

#Powerful #Thinking #Cynical
Despite the obvious damage now visible in the entropic desolation of every American home town, Wal-Mart managed to install itself in the pantheon of American Dream icons, along with apple pie, motherhood, and Coca Cola.
-- James Howard Kunstler

#Dream #Home #Motherhood
If the Internet exists at all in the future, it will be on a much-reduced scale from what we enjoy today, and all the activities of everyday life are not going to reside on it.
-- James Howard Kunstler

#Everyday #Today #Internet
My beef with the alt-fuel people is not the renewable or alt-fuel ideas themselves. Sooner or later, there's no question we're going to have to rely on them. For me, it's an issue of scale.
-- James Howard Kunstler

#Ideas #Issues #People
On top of the insult of destroying the geographic places we call home, the chain stores also destroyed people's place in the order of daily life, including the duties, responsibilities, obligations, and ceremonies that prompt citizens to care for each other.
-- James Howard Kunstler

#Home #Responsibility #Order
Motion is a great tranquilizer.
-- James Howard Kunstler
The two elements of the suburban pattern that cause the greatest problems are the extreme separation of uses and the vast distances between things
-- James Howard Kunstler

#Distance #Cities #Two
If it happens that the human race doesn't make it, then the fact that we were here once will not be altered, that once upon a time we peopled this astonishing blue planet, and wondered intelligently at everything about it and the other things who lived here with us on it, and that we celebrated the beauty of it in music and art, architecture, literature, and dance, and that there were times when we approached something godlike in our abilities and aspirations. We emerged out of depthless mystery, and back into mystery we returned,and in the end the mystery is all there is.
-- James Howard Kunstler

#Art #Race #Blue
Community is not something you have, like pizza. Now is it something you can buy. It's a living organism based on a web of interdependencies- which is to say, a local economy. It expresses itself physically as connectedness, as buildings actively relating to each other, and to whatever public space exists, be it the street, or the courthouse or the village green.
-- James Howard Kunstler

#Space #Community #Village
The American house has been TV-centered for three generations. It is the focus of family life, and the life of the house correspondingly turns inward, away from whatever corresponds beyond its four walls.At the same time, the television is the families chief connection to the world. The physical envelope of the house itself no longer connects their lives to the outside in any active way; rather it seals them from it.The outside world has become an abstraction filtered through television, just as the weather is an abstraction filtered through air conditioning.
-- James Howard Kunstler

#Wall #Air #Weather
The immersive ugliness of our everyday environments in America is entropy made visible.
-- James Howard Kunstler

#America #Everyday #Environment
The public realm in America has two roles: it is the dwelling place of our civilization and our civic life, and it is the physical manifestation of the common good. When you degrade the public realm, you will automatically degrade the quality of your civic life and the character of all the enactments of your public life and communal life that take place there.
-- James Howard Kunstler

#Character #Civilization #Two
The twentieth century was about getting around. The twenty-first century will be about staying in a place worth staying in.
-- James Howard Kunstler

#Twenties #Firsts #Century
Anything goes and nothing matters.
-- James Howard Kunstler

#Anything Goes #Matter #Nothing Matters
Iâ€™m serenely convinced that we are heading into what will amount to a time out from technological progress as we know it,
-- James Howard Kunstler

#Progress #Technological Progress #Technological
Americans threw away their communities in order to save a few dollars on hair dryers and plastic food storage tubs, never stopping to reflect on what they were destroying.
-- James Howard Kunstler

#Hair #Order #Community
No amount or combination of alternative fuels is going to allow us to continue running what we're running, the way we're running it.
-- James Howard Kunstler

#Running #Alternatives #Fuel
A land full of places that are not worth caring about may soon be a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending.
-- James Howard Kunstler

#Caring #Land #May
Ridicule is the unfortunate destiny of the ridiculous.
-- James Howard Kunstler

#Destiny #Ridiculous #Ridicule

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