James Howard Kunstler quotes

Motion is a great tranquilizer. (James Howard Kunstler)
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
James Howard Kunstler
Our twenty-first century economy may focus on agriculture, not information. View quote
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. View quote
James Howard Kunstler
I had one of those steel thermal mugs you carried everywhere with you as a kind of signifier of how busy, and therefore how important you were. View quote
James Howard Kunstler
It was more possible that the human race possessed some spark of divinity that was worth cultivating than that a mysterious being was up there in the ether somewhere with anthropomorphic qualities of goodness and mercy running the whole show. View quote
James Howard Kunstler
The racket was coming over what used to be our public radio station, WAMC out of Albany, but the familiar reassuring voices of normality were long gone. Some febrile evangelist was railing from the Book of Revelation. (James Howard Kunstler)
Children [...] had sat in those very box buildings under buzzing fluorescent lights listening to their science teachers prattle about the wonders of space travel and gene splicing and how we were all going to live to be a hundred and twenty five years old in "smart" computer-controlled houses where all we had to do was speak to bump up the heat or turn on giant home theater screens in a life of perpetual leisure and comfort. It made me sick to think about. Not because there's something necessarily wrong with leisure or comfort, but because that's where our aspirations ended. And in the face of what had actually happened to us, it seemed obscenely stupid. View quote
James Howard Kunstler
Living by the clock was an old habit that died hard. Not much that we did required punctuality, but people still wanted to know what time it was. View quote
James Howard Kunstler
Whole ideologies had to be constructed to account for being modern and to explain it. View quote
James Howard Kunstler
Oil is the world's most critical resource. Without it, nothing works in industrial civilization as currently configured. Few people dispute the idea that the world will eventually run out of oil, and there is a broad recognition that it will happen [...]. View quote
James Howard Kunstler
[...] Life is tragic and history won't shed a tear for us if we make poor collective decisions, or adopt beliefs that are inconsistent with reality. View quote
James Howard Kunstler
Could we even pretend the law still existed? Or was it something you made up now, as the occasion required? View quote
James Howard Kunstler
We lived more by the sun than by the clock, but I did own a clock. It was an eight-day windup console clock which I kept on the mantel in the living room, and it was the only timepiece in the house that worked anymore. View quote
James Howard Kunstler
We were content to be undisturbed in our our little backwater, Union Grove, Washington County, in a place once called the Empire State, where the Battenkill runs into the Hudson River. View quote
James Howard Kunstler
Waterford began its existence as the gateway to the Erie Canal system, the first stretch of which was built to bypass several waterfalls on the Mohawk River. View quote
James Howard Kunstler
We all knew the apparatus of justice had dissolved. (James Howard Kunstler)
There's real strangeness in this world of ours. Back in the machine times, there was so much noise front and back, so to speak, it kept us from knowing what lies behind the surface of things. View quote
James Howard Kunstler
The essence of politics was to not act on your impulses. View quote
James Howard Kunstler
I'd been carrying [my Ruger.41 Magnum] so many days that I had almost forgotten it was there. This was the kind of world we now lived in. View quote
James Howard Kunstler
It was obvious there would be no return to "normality." The economy wouldn't be coming back. Globalism was over. The politicians and generals were failing to pull things together at the center. We would not be returning to Boston. The computer industry, in which so many hopes had been vested, was fading into history. View quote
James Howard Kunstler