“The United States is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, yet its inhabitants are strikingly unhappy. Accordingly, we present to the rest of mankind, on a planet rife with suffering and tragedy, the spectacle of a clown… — James Howard Kunstler Copy Share Image
The ideas of [ Le Corbusier ] that actually found their way into practice were deeply destructive - for instance, the tower-in-a-park, which mutated… — James Howard Kunstler Copy Share Image
“On my way out of [Atlantic City] at quarter after seven in the morning, a young pump jockey at the gas station [...] mentioned that another man had lost $20,000 at Trop World a few hours earlier and had to be dragged out of the casino kicking and screaming. I asked if this happened a lot. "Man," he said, "there's… — James Howard Kunstler Copy Share
Ahead now, I think you'll see the big nations shrink back into their own corners of the world. I'm not saying we'll see no international trade, but it will be nothing like the conveyer belt from China to Wal-Mart that we've known the last few decades. And the prospects for conflict are very, very high. — James Howard Kunstler Copy Share
The task we face is reorganizing the systems we depend on for daily life in a way that is consistent with the realities coming… — James Howard Kunstler Copy Share Image
White America is tortured by black America's failure to thrive, and all that guilt and anxiety has only gotten worse as a substantial quota… — James Howard Kunstler Copy Share Image
What we face is a comprehensive contraction of our activities, due to declining fossil fuel resources and other growing scarcities. Our failure is the failure to manage contraction. It requires a thoroughgoing reorganization of daily life. No political faction currently operating in the USA gets this. Hence, it is liable to be settled by a contest for dwindling resources and… — James Howard Kunstler Copy Share
We're living in a culture that doesn't believe in decorating buildings, or proportioning them properly. And they don't know how to do it anymore… — James Howard Kunstler Copy Share Image
Because I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities,… — James Howard Kunstler Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Everything we do these days - our lust for ever more comfort, pleasure, and distraction, our refusal to engage with the mandates of reality,… — James Howard Kunstler Copy Share Image
There's a lot of wishful thinking that somehow we'll replace fossil fuels with alternative energy sources, but they remain far from reality. We're not going to run Wal-Mart, Disney World, and the interstate highway system on any combination of alternative or renewable energy - solar, wind, algae oils, ethanol, used french-fry grease, you name it. — James Howard Kunstler Copy Share
Our twenty-first century economy may focus on agriculture, not information. — James Howard Kunstler Copy Share Image