James Howard Kunstler Quotes (45 quotes)

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World Made By Hand

James Howard Kunstler

The Long Emergency

James Howard Kunstler

James Howard Kunstler: 45 quotes 0 likes

Famous James Howard Kunstler Quotes

“Could we even pretend the law still existed? Or was it something you made up now, as the occasion required?”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 38, p. 181

“I lay wake […] listening to the rain drip from the eaves and thinking of the big map that hung from the top of the chalkboard in my primary school in Wilton, Connecticut, so many years ago, back in the days of cars, television, and air-conditioning. The states on this map were muted tones of pink, green, and yellow. Over it hung the flag that we pledged allegiance to every single morning. "One nation under God, indivisible…"”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 31, p. 150

“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.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 4, p. 20

“In the early twenty-first century farming had all but died out here. We got our food from the supermarket, and not everybody cared where the supermarket got it as long as it was there on the shelves. A few elderly dairymen hung on. Many let their fields and pastures go to scrub. Some sold out to what used to be called developers, and they'd put in five or ten poorly build houses. Now, in the new times, there were far fewer people, and many houses outside town were being taken down for their materials. Farming was back. That was the only way we got food.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 1, p. 5

“Jesus […] look how we live? I'm practically a serf.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 7, p. 37

“As the world changed, we reverted to social divisions that we'd thought were obsolete. The egalitarian pretenses of the high-octane decades had dissolved and nobody even debated it anymore, including the women of our town. A plain majority of the townspeople were laborers now, whatever in life they had been before. Nobody in town called them peasants, but in a effect that's what they'd become. That's just the way things were.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 21, p. 101

James Howard Kunstler Quotes about people

“Few dogs were around anymore. Some had been eaten during the hunger that followed the flu in the spring of that year. People didn't talk about it, it was so demoralizing.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 7, p. 36

“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.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 4, p. 20

“You could argue people are generally better off now mentally than they were back then. We follow the natural cycles. We eat real food instead of processed crap full of chemicals. We're not jacked up on coffee and television and sexy advertising all the time. No more anxiety about credit card bills.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 7, p. 37–38

“We regarded opium as a godsend. It did not develop into an illicit trade, though. There was no legal prohibition, no police running around trying to suppress drugs, driving up the price artificially, and no marketing system. There were no distant markets to send it to because shipping anything was slow at best and often unreliable, and travel was something you just didn't do anymore. Anybody could grow their own poppies or buy raw opium paste from one of the growers. Farmers made more money growing raspberries or asparagus. They grew poppies as a public service. A few people took to smoking opium, but those with an extremely apathetic attitude toward survival tended not to last long in the new disposition of things.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 5, p. 30

“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 [...].”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 3, p. 64.

James Howard Kunstler Quotes about the world

“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.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 55, p. 262

“In a world that had become a salvage operation, the general supply evolved into Union Grove's leading industry. When every last useful thing in town had been stripped from the Kmart and the United Auto, the CVS drugstore, and other trading establishments of the bygone national chain-store economy, daily life became a perpetual flea market centered on the old town dump.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 5, p. 28

“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.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 36, p. 171

“We're building our own New Jerusalem up the river. It's a world made by hand, now, one stone at a time, one board at a time, one hope at a time, one soul at a time.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 29, p. 142

James Howard Kunstler Quotes

“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.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 65, p. 317

“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.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 28, p. 137

“We all knew the apparatus of justice had dissolved.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 12, p. 57

Justice

“The essence of politics was to not act on your impulses.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 42, p. 199

“I searched the FM band but there was nothing besides other pious pleaders, and they didn't come in too well. The AM band offered about the same thing, only with worse reception, nothing remotely describable as news, and no music because commercial entertainment as we knew it was no more, and its handmaiden, advertising had gone with it.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 4, p. 21

Music , Search

“I argued that the human race should have known it was in for trouble, at least we in the United States should have, given how insane our way of life had become. Minor quit blowing into his harmonica long enough to say that John D. Rockefeller and the Bush family had made a deal with the Devil going back all the way to the 1900s.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 38, p. 181

Life , Family , Way

“Whatever the other failures of the U. S. government were, it had managed to print an excess of dollars which, combined with the collapse of trade and communication, had severely eroded the currency's value.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 30, p. 146

Communication , Failure

“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.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 4, p. 24

Hope , History

“I switched on the television on the outside chance that something might come through. Nothing had been on for years. The local network affiliates withered away after the national network of cable channels went out, until there was nothing.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 4, p. 20–21

Chance

“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.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 4, p. 22

Business

“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.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 65, p. 315–316

“Motion is a great tranquilizer.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 6, p. 34

“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 book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 4, p. 20

Books

“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.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 6, p. 33–34

Life , Children , Stupidity , Travel

“I remembered Albany […] as just another down-on-its-luck small American city that had sacrificed its vitality to a whirring ring of homogenous suburbs.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 29, p. 140

“The energy disruptions of the Long Emergency are going to remind us that the skyscraper was an experimental building form.”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 7, p. 253.

“[…] The human race living off the "drawdown" of nonrenewable fossil fuel resources is the equivalent of the algae […] enjoying a temporary rush of nutrients […].”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 6, p. 208.

“We used [oil] […] as if there was no tomorrow. Now there may not be one. That's how special oil has been.”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 2, p. 31.

“The age of fossil fuels is about to end. There is no replacement for them at hand.”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 2, p. 23.

Age

“The Long Emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race. It is likely to entail political turbulence every bit as extreme as the economic conditions that prompt it.”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 1, p. 20.

“Everything can tend toward diminishing returns and unsustainability, […] even in the short term.”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 7, p. 240.

“Many individual immune systems will be compromised by the hardships of the Long Emergency and disease will seize the opportunities presented, as it always has. […] Millions of human beings are going to die.”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 5, p. 182.

Disease

“Our brains are […] not equipped to process events on the geologic scale—at least in reference to how we choose to live, or what we choose to do in the here-and-now.”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 5, p. 148.

“The so-called global economy was not a permanent institution, […] but a set of transient circumstances peculiar to a certain time: the Indian summer of the fossil fuel era.”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 1, p. 12.

Time , Summer

“[…] Abrupt climate change may be normal in the planet's history, or, to state it differently, that the earth's climate is inherently very unstable. The period in which human civilization developed has been if anything, an anomalous ten-thousand-year epoch of remarkable stability.”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 5, p. 149.

History , Change

“Our brains are […] not equipped to process events on […] scale[s] [larger than a human lifetime] […].”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 5, p. 148.

“The economic stress [struggle] among […] all nations, […] will be considerable and is certain to lead to increasingly desperate competition for diminishing supplies of oil and every other resource.”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 3, p. 68.

“[…] Abrupt climate change may be normal in the planet's history, or, to state it differently, that the earth's [sic] climate is inherently very unstable.”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 5, p. 149.

History , Change

“Whole ideologies had to be constructed to account for being modern and to explain it.”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 2, p. 22.

“[…] 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.”

James Howard Kunstler

"The Old American Dream Is a Nightmare," March 9, 2011.

History , Decision , Reality , Life

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