James Howard Kunstler

Motion is a great tranquilizer.

— James Howard Kunstler

Ridicule is the unfortunate destiny of the ridiculous.

— James Howard Kunstler

“The sentimental view of anything is apt to be ridiculous,”

— James Howard Kunstler

Societies get what they deserve, not what they expect.

— James Howard Kunstler

Anything goes and nothing matters.

— James Howard Kunstler

At the heart of our misunderstanding and infantile behavior is the wish for a miracle cure.

— James Howard Kunstler

I believe most of suburbia is unreformable and will not be fixed.

— James Howard Kunstler

Forget [Le Corbusier ]. Forget Modernism. Forget yesterdays' tomorrow.

— James Howard Kunstler

America does not want change, except from the cash register at Wal-Mart.

— James Howard Kunstler

Suburbia is the insidious cartoon of the country house in a cartoon of the country.

— James Howard Kunstler

The cities of the future will be much smaller than they are today.

— James Howard Kunstler

American cities are not scaled to the energy diet of the future. They have become too large. They're over-scaled.

— James Howard Kunstler

The earth is a fickle place for all life, not least the human project of civilization.

— James Howard Kunstler

Americans threw away their communities in order to save a few dollars on hair dryers and plastic food storage tubs, never stopping…

— James Howard Kunstler

I'm very optimistic about the future. I'm just not optimistic about the skyscraper as a building typology that is suited for the…

— James Howard Kunstler

We have to do commerce differently because the WalMart system of big box chain retail will soon die. This means rebuilding local…

— James Howard Kunstler

The skyscraper - any building over seven stories really - will come to be seen as an experimental building type that doesn't…

— James Howard Kunstler

When a society is stressed, when it comes up against things that are hard to understand, you get a lot of delusional…

— James Howard Kunstler

I believe our techno-zealotry will be moderated by sheer circumstance. We will do what reality compels us to do, not necessarily what…

— James Howard Kunstler

I am far less interested in serving as a change agent than in functioning as a prose artist, whether it's fiction or…

— James Howard Kunstler

We're not going to reform our moronic land-use laws, which mandate suburban sprawl one way or another. They're simply going to be…

— James Howard Kunstler

Because I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls,…

— James Howard Kunstler

It's self-evident that we are going to have permanent problems with oil and gasoline and the prime resources that are needed to…

— James Howard Kunstler

The model of the human habitat dictated by zoning is a formless, soul-less, centerless, demoralizing mess. It bankrupts families and townships. It…

— James Howard Kunstler

It is true that we need a consensus to go forward with restoring passenger rail in America, and often a consensus is…

— James Howard Kunstler

Ever-busy, ever-building, ever-in-motion, ever-throwing-out the old for the new, we have hardly paused to think about what we are so busy building,…

— James Howard Kunstler

The "Green" community, the enviro people, are preoccupied with running all the cars differently. Our techno-grandiosity has us gibbering about high-speed rail…

— James Howard Kunstler

I'm convinced that the Great Lakes region will be at the center of an internally-focused North American economy when the hallucination of…

— James Howard Kunstler

I think water transport will see a revival. However, we're not going to replay the 20th century. The industrial city of that…

— James Howard Kunstler

We're still promoting stupid wasteful behavior in agribusiness - everything from ethanol production for cars to genetically modified crops. In commerce just…

— James Howard Kunstler

We have to make some things for ourselves because the conveyer belt from China is doomed (this process is known as import…

— James Howard Kunstler

We might hope that the law as a profession does not vanish, because justice may vanish with it - but we could…

— James Howard Kunstler

Building places that are worth living in and worth caring about require a certain attention to detail, and of a particular kind…

— James Howard Kunstler

I won't deny the polemical elements in my work, but they are less in the service of attempting to reform human behavior…

— James Howard Kunstler

The aggressive incoherence of our common surroundings can be described as entropy made visible. The way we have disposed things on the…

— James Howard Kunstler

The American house has been TV-centered for three generations. It is the focus of family life, and the life of the house…

— James Howard Kunstler

“The United States is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, yet its inhabitants are strikingly unhappy. Accordingly, we present…

— James Howard Kunstler

The industrial age is over. What follows will be life lived on a much smaller and finer scale.

— James Howard Kunstler

The twentieth century was about getting around. The twenty-first century will be about staying in a place worth staying in.

— James Howard Kunstler

Most of suburbia will end up in three ways: ruins, slums, salvage yards for materials.

— James Howard Kunstler