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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

James Howard Kunstler Quotes

The model of the human habitat dictated by zoning is a formless, soul-less, centerless, demoralizing mess. It bankrupts families and townships. It disables whole classes of decent, normal citizens. It ruins the air we breathe. It corrupts and deadens our spirit.

– 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 future.

– James Howard Kunstler

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

Generations will soon come into their power feeling differently about themselves than we do now, and in their re-enchanted world, they will wonder about us and what we did to their world, and what we thought we were doing.

– James Howard Kunstler

Black America surely faces an existential crisis, but not the one imagined in the condescending news media – of somehow getting non-black America to be more just and generous. The truth is, we’ve already been through that, and there is nothing left to do. We’re out of ‘affirmative actions’ of all kinds.

– James Howard Kunstler

I don’t like talking about ‘solutions.’ I prefer talking about intelligent responses.

– James Howard Kunstler

One of the problems with the fiasco of suburbia is that it destroyed our understanding of the distinction between the country and the town, between the urban and the rural. They’re not the same thing.

– James Howard Kunstler

Parallel parking is desirable for two reasons: parked cars create a physical barrier and psychological buffer that protects pedestrians on the sidewalk from moving vehicles; and a rich supply of parallel parking can eliminate the need for parking lots, which are extremely destructive of the civic fabric.

– James Howard Kunstler

As a long-time registered Democrat who started voting in the year of Watergate, I resent being taken for a ride to the place where anything goes and nothing matters. And especially where nothing matters less than clear thinking and straight talk.

– James Howard Kunstler

Phoenix and Las Vegas have grim long-term prospects. On top of oil-and-gas problems, they will have terrible problems with water and the ability to produce food locally. I suppose it shows how delusional the public is, and how our institutional controls have decayed – for instance, lending standards.

– James Howard Kunstler

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

The popular story is that America was built by immigrants and that, therefore, everything about immigration is good and leads to a more successful society. This narrative is so devoid of historical context that it should embarrass anyone beyond a second-grade education.

– James Howard Kunstler

History is moving the furniture around in the house of mankind just about everywhere but the U.S.A. Things have changed, except here, where people come and go through the rooms of state, and everything looks shabbier by the day, and lethargy eats away at the upholstery like an acid fog, and the walls reverberate with meaningless oratory.

– James Howard Kunstler

The newspaper headlines may shout about global warming, extinctions of living species, the devastation of rain forests, and other worldwide catastrophes, but Americans evince a striking complacency when it comes to their everyday environment and the growing calamity that it represents.

– James Howard Kunstler

History is merciless. History doesn’t care if we pound our society down a rat hole. It’s up to us to make more intelligent choices about how we live!

– James Howard Kunstler

Everything we do these days – our lust for ever more comfort, pleasure, and distraction, our refusal to engage with the mandates of reality, our fidelity to cults of technology and limitless growth, our narcissistic national exceptionalism – all of this propels us toward the realm where souls abandon all hope.

– James Howard Kunstler

The Hamas organization is explicitly dedicated to the destruction of Israel. That is not a rhetorical gimmick; it is its declared unwavering primary goal.

– James Howard Kunstler

The human race needs a time out from all this techno-magic-mischief, a period to reflect on what we’ve done and how we ought to behave with this stuff.

– James Howard Kunstler

Our twenty-first century economy may focus on agriculture, not information.

– James Howard Kunstler

Neurologically, people have a need to feel oriented, to know where they are, not just in terms of a compass and not just in terms of geography, but in terms of their culture and history. To be informed about where they’re coming from and to have some glimpse towards a hopeful future.

– James Howard Kunstler

Saudi Arabia is, of course, the keystone of OPEC. Saudi Arabia has had the distinction of remaining stable through all the escalating tumult of recent decades, reliably pumping out its roughly 10 million barrels a day like Bossy the cow in America’s oil import barn.

– James Howard Kunstler

In short, chronological connectivity puts us in touch with the holy. It is at once humbling and exhilarating. I say this as someone who has never followed any formal religious practice. Connection with the past and the future is a pathway that charms us in the direction of sanity and grace.

– James Howard Kunstler

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

I do all I can to maintain good health. I eat mostly plants, as Michael Pollan would say. I get a lot of exercise. I lead a purposeful daily life. I stay current with the dentist. I made the formative decision of where to live over thirty years ago when I settled in a ‘main street’ small town in upstate New York.

– James Howard Kunstler

Human settlements are like living organisms. They must grow, and they will change. But we can decide on the nature of that growth – on the quality and the character of it – and where it ought to go. We don’t have to scatter the building blocks of our civic life all over the countryside, destroying our towns and ruining farmland.

– 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 oil-powered globalism dissolves. Places like Buffalo, Cleveland, and Detroit will have a new life, but not at the scale of the twentieth century.

– James Howard Kunstler