James Howard Kunstler Quotes

Consumerism is our national religion.

Greed, it ain't going anywhere. They should have that in a big billboard across Times Square. Without people you're nothing.

Somewhere along the way America became a giant mall with a country attached.

I love consumerism, TV culture, shopping malls. There's nothing I'd ever buy, but I like being there. It's wacky.

Capitalism is an organized system to guarantee that greed becomes the primary force of our economic system and allows the few at the top to get very wealthy and has the rest of us riding around thinking we can be that way, too - if we just work hard enough, sell enough Tupperware and Amway products, we can get a pink Cadillac.

The mall is my life.

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.

I'm totally anti-commercialism.

There's a lot of bad isms floating around this world, but one of the worst is commercialism.

The land of the capitalists…

These days malls are the cathedrals of the modern world, and old buildings that had character are gone to allow for econo-worship and peso-pilgrimages.

A market economy is a tool—a valuable and effective tool—for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values sweep into every aspect of human endeavor. It is a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.

I think the main focus in America is - is basically greed.

Modern man's happiness consists in the thrill of looking at the shop windows, and in buying all that he can afford to buy, either for cash or on installments.

...There is no end to the making and selling of things there is no end to the making and selling of things there is no end... Man, it occurs to me, is a joyful, buying-and-selling piece of work. I have been wrong, dead wrong, when I've decried consumerism. Consumerism is what we are. It is, in a sense, a holy impulse. A human being is someone who joyfully goes in pursuit of things, brings them home, then immediately starts planning how to get more.

America... an economic system prouder of the distribution of its products than of the products themselves.

Commercialism is the blemish on the fair face of American life. Fighting against the terrible conditions of the explorer and pioneer, our forefathers had little time to think of beauty. Hearts and heads became as hardened to the more gracious things of life as did their bodies against physical hardship. Little by little, as nature yielded before the dynamite of their wills, life began to express itself in the same hard terms, and the great commerce of a New World bent everything to its indomitable will.

My image is a statement of the symbols of the harsh, impersonal products and brash materialistic objects on which America is built today. It is a projection of everything that can be bought and sold, and practical but impermanent symbols that sustain us.

Modern man, if he dared to be articulate about his concept of heaven, would describe a vision which would look like the biggest department store in the world, showing new things and gadgets, and himself having plenty of money with which to buy them.

I think about capitalism, consumerism, our consumptive nature as a species approaching the 21st century. I certainly don't have the answers.

Cinema is capitalism in its purest form.... There is only one solution - turn one's back on American cinema.

Everybody in America is so money-hungry. It's like a rat race and even when you win you're still a freaking rat.

Capitalism, as practiced, is a financially profitable, non-sustainable aberration in human development.

Consumerism is hard to describe when it's the ocean and we're the plankton.

Fashion is capitalism's favourite child.