Quotes from James Howard Kunstler

I think that Obama's failure to reestablish the rule of law in money matters is the most damaging thing that he's done - and perhaps the most damaging thing that has happened in American politics in my lifetime. Because once the rule of law is absent in money matters, then anything really goes in politics.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Where did Wayne Newton go when the USA went to shit? I was more stoned than I had realized.

The car wrecked the southland. It wrecked Atlanta worse than Sherman ever did. It paved over my Virginia. They made themselves slaves to the car and everything connected with it, and it destroyed them in the end. Well, here's to the New South. May it rest in peace.

In effect, 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 what they were destroying.

America does not want change, except from the cash register at Wal-Mart.

Ridicule is the unfortunate destiny of the ridiculous.

The car, is the other connection to the outside world, but to be precise it connects the inhabitants to the inside of the car, not to the outside world per se. The outside world is only an element for moving through, as submarines move through water.

When they come to chronicle the decline of this civilization," he said, "they're going to wonder why we were debating flag burning, abortion, and broccoli eating instead of the fundamental issues of how we live and use the environment.

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- which is to say, a local economy. It expresses itself physically as connectedness, as buildings actively relating to each other, and to whatever public space exists, be it the street, or the courthouse or the village green.

There was nothing like it before in history: a machine that promised liberation from the daily bondage of place. And in a free country like the United States, with the unrestricted right to travel, a vast geographical territory to spread out into, and a national tradition of picking up and moving whenever life became intolerable, the automobile came as a blessing.

Tradition evolves with time and place while holding strongly to certain formal, cultural, and personal principles. Nostalgia seeks the security of past forms without the inherent principles.

Community is not something you have, like pizza. Nor is it something you can buy. It's a living organism based on a web of interdependencies- which is to say, a local economy. It expresses itself physically as connectedness, as buildings actively relating to each other, and to whatever public space exists, be it the street, or the courthouse or the village green.

is a direct connection between suburban sprawl and the spiraling cost of government, and most Americans don't see it yet, including many in government. Likewise

The nation was cracking under the weight of bloated modernity and all the patches pasted onto its excessive and malfunctioning hypercomplexity, and people were bewildered by the strange glitches, failures and shortages. Going forward, nothing would really work anymore as it was designed to, yet the hope and expectation that it would all magically recover dominated the chatter in the rare moments when people could step back from their frantic lives and share a meal or a drink.

The sentimental view of anything is apt to be ridiculous

What if people come and take all the books away and melt them like they did to the motorcars?' 'Books don't melt.

The culture of good place-making, like the culture of farming, or agriculture, is a body of knowledge and acquired skills. It is not bred in the bone, and if it is not transmitted from one generation to the next, it is lost.

There is no shortage of apologists for the ubiquitous highway crud.

He was conscious that his thoughts and feelings were the same utterly unoriginal torments of billions like him: the bewildering indifference of the universe, the pointlessness of suffering, the inescapable obligation to abide with it.

Their crowing and the vapors of the hot sauce helped clear enough room in my head to think about out what I had to do. Planning my day was a way of not giving into despair. It really is not possible to pay attention fully to two things at once. For instance: carpentry and suicide.