James Howard Kunstler Quotes - Page 3

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, away from whatever corresponds beyond its four walls.At the same time, the television is the families chief connection to the world. The physical envelope of the house itself no longer connects their lives to the outside in any active way; rather it seals them from it.The outside world has become an abstraction filtered through television, just as the weather is an abstraction filtered through air conditioning.

Anyone who studies the energy predicament understands its connection with the operations of capital - and by this I do not mean capitalism as an ideology, I mean the behavior of acquired wealth and its deployment for productive purpose. (A lot of educated idiots don't understand this, and we waste a lot of time blathering about capitalism.)

We don't need gold plated highways. We don't need zoning commissions which penalize offices at home and promote car commutes.

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

Two decades from now, I doubt that the home building industry, so called, will even exist as we have known it.

I think a lot of things will be self-correcting, even in America. After all, human societies are essentially self-organizing emergent systems. The catch is, how much disorder will we have to endure while this re-self-organizing process occurs.

Ridicule is the unfortunate destiny of the ridiculous.

Once energy problems gain traction, there will be a large new class of economic losers, and consequently a lot of social turbulence.

I think water transport will see a revival. However, we're not going to replay the 20th century. The industrial city of that era will not be revived. Our cities are going to contract. Many of them will contract as a whole but densify at their core.

I'm not against Kyoto. I just think it's a fantasy, especially considering China's energy predicament and their coal supplies.

Cities like Detroit exist because they occupy important sites. In the case of Detroit, it sits on a river between two great lakes - very important and strategic.

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 because they haven't been doing it for, you know, the better part of the century.

Please, please, stop referring to yourselves as "consumers." OK? Consumers are different than citizens. Consumers do not have obligations, responsibilities and duties to their fellow human beings. And as long as you're using that word "consumer" in the public discussion, you will be degrading the quality of the discussion we're having. And we're going to continue being clueless going into this very difficult future that we face

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.

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

My beef with the alt-fuel people is not the renewable or alt-fuel ideas themselves. Sooner or later, there's no question we're going to have to rely on them. For me, it's an issue of scale.

I don't like talking about 'solutions.' I prefer talking about intelligent responses.

Motion is a great tranquilizer.

It is worth remembering that our cities occupy important sites, and therefore some kind of settlement is liable to be there.

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.

If it happens that the human race doesn't make it, then the fact that we were here once will not be altered, that once upon a time we peopled this astonishing blue planet, and wondered intelligently at everything about it and the other things who lived here with us on it, and that we celebrated the beauty of it in music and art, architecture, literature, and dance, and that there were times when we approached something godlike in our abilities and aspirations. We emerged out of depthless mystery, and back into mystery we returned,and in the end the mystery is all there is.

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 of everyday life are not going to reside on it.

I have a new theory of history, which is certain things happen because they seem like a good idea at the time. And suburbia seemed like a good idea at the time, but it was a special time and place in history, with special dynamics. And now, we're going to have to live with the consequences of that. And the consequences will be tragic.

Building places that are worth living in and worth caring about require a certain attention to detail, and of a particular kind of detail that we have forgotten how to design and assemble. And that involves the relationship of the buildings to each other, the relationship of the buildings to the public space, which in America, comes mostly in the form of the street. Because it's only the exceptional places in America that have the village square or the New England green. You know. The street is mostly the public realm of America. And we have to design these things so that they reward us.