Quotes from James Howard Kunstler

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holidays were important to us in ways that might be inconceivable to people whose sole conception of Christmas had been based on frantic excursions to gigantic chain stores. We lived by the seasons now. Our survival depended on it. And we marked the seasons by frequent holiday celebrations, fetes, levees, balls, and solemn days of remembrance.

The world tilted, but he had anticipated and prepared for it and the tilt affected him favorably, especially his internal demeanor, which was one of a cheerful engagement with reality.

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.

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 of resources in the history of the world.

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.

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.

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 defending.

The earth is a fickle place for all life, not least the human project of civilization.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Ever-busy, ever-building, ever-in-motion, ever-throwing-out the old for the new, we have hardly paused to think about what we are so busy building, and what we have thrown away. Meanwhile, the everyday landscape becomes more nightmarish and unmanageable each year.

The industrial age is over. What follows will be life lived on a much smaller and finer scale.

The task we face is reorganizing the systems we depend on for daily life in a way that is consistent with the realities coming down at us.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We have created thousands and thousands of places in America that aren't worth caring about, and when we have enough of them, we're going to have a country that's not worth defending.

White America is tortured by black America's failure to thrive, and all that guilt and anxiety has only gotten worse as a substantial quota of white America loses its own footing in the middle class and plunges into the rough country of joblessness, hopelessness, and government dependency.