James Howard Kunstler Quotes

43 quotes in 878 categories

• Ridicule is the unfortunate destiny of the ridiculous.
• 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-…
• 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,…
• The immersive ugliness of our everyday environments in America is entropy made visible.
• 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…
• The twentieth century was about getting around. The twenty-first century will be about staying in a place worth staying in.
• Anything goes and nothing matters.
• I’m serenely convinced that we are heading into what will amount to a time out from technological progress as we know it,
• 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…
• 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.
• 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…
• 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…
• The two elements of the suburban pattern that cause the greatest problems are the extreme separation of uses and the vast distances between things
• Suburbia is the insidious cartoon of the country house in a cartoon of the country.
• I don't like talking about 'solutions.' I prefer talking about intelligent responses.
• 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.
• When a society is stressed, when it comes up against things that are hard to understand, you get a lot of delusional thinking.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…

Browse James Howard Kunstler Quotes by Category