Notes from: The Geography of Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler
Page 108
...not everyone failed to notice that the end product of all this furious commerce-for-its-own-sake was a trashy and preposterous human habitat with no future.
     The Aquarian uproar of the late 60s was largely a reaction to this crisis of cultural values and the sense of Doom it induced. A generation came of age and realized with a rude shock that there was something very wrong with the creeping-crud economy they had grown up with, with its voracious appetite for natural resources, its tawdry material rewards, its lamebrained notion of the Good Life, and ultimately its dreadful heedlessness of long-term costs. In rejecting it, these aptly named counterculture folk attempted a return to tribalism in order to recapture a sense of human continuities in their everyday surroundings. But the movement found its most vehement expression in the Vietnam War protests - the war being a violent projection overseas of what was most unwholesome and destructive in our own national life - and when the war came to its long-delayed conclusion, it proved a practical impossibility to exist in an alternative culture - or alternative economy - within the larger one, so the movement fizzled out.

Page 121
Try to imagine a building of any dignity surrounded by 6 acres of parked cars. The problems are obvious. Obvious solution: build buildings without dignity.

Page 167
The television is the family's chief connection with the outside world. The physical envelope of the house itself no longer connects their lives to the outside in any way; rather, it seals them off from it. The outside world has become an abstraction filtered through television, just as the weather is an abstraction filtered through air conditioning.
     The car, of course, is the other connection to the outside world, but to be precise it connects the inhabitants to the inside of their car, not to the outside world per se. The outside world is only an element for moving through, as submarines move through water.
     As the outside world became more of an abstraction, and the outside of the house lost its detail, it began to broadcast information about itself and its owners in the abstracted language of television, specifically of television advertising, which is to say a form of communication based on simplifications and lies. As in television advertising, the lies have to be broad and simple because the intended audience is a passing motorist who will glance at the house for a few seconds. So, one dwelling has a fake little cupola to denote vaguely an image of rusticity; another has a fake portico a la Gone With the Wind, with skinny two-story white columns out of proportion with the mass of the house, and a cement slab too narrow to put a rocking chair on, hinting at wealth and gentility; a third has the plastic pediment over the door and brass carriage lamps on either side, invoking "tradition."

Page 168
Charm is dependent on connectedness, on continuities, on the relation of one thing to another, often expressed as tension, like the tension between private space and public space... Of course, if the public space is degraded by cars and their special needs - as it always is in America, whether you live in Beverly hills or Levittown - the equation is spoiled. If nothing is sacred, then everything is profane.

Page 192
The [Detroit] subway was never built, and for good reasons. Detroit had become such a spread-out, low-density metropolis of single-family houses that a system huge enough to serve it was mathematically unlikely to attract enough riders to pay for itself. This would become the basic dilemma of public transit for all American suburbia later on.

Page 225
A recurring feature in nearly every [Disney World] attraction is the theme of death and mayhem. And every turn you encounter scenes of it... cute, rum-soaked animatronic buccaneers are all busy ravishing women, pillaging taverns, stabbing, hacking, and shooting each other, while you just sit there floating gently by in the dark, passively taking it in... You turn down the short stretch of Disney's "western" street in Frontierland and actors dressed as gunman are suddenly plugging each other... (A hundred years from now do you suppose they will recreate the drive-by shootings of LA gangs for the amusement of children? How about the spectacular fast-food store massacres of recent years?)... The amount of creative energy invested in morbid depictions of violent death is impressive.
     How does this differ from past entertainments aimed at children, from the "death-defying" spectacles of the old big top (and it's freak-filled sideshow) to the rancid attractions of any county fair? Mainly in this way: Disney pretends so hard to be wholesome. The customers go along with this falsehood, because it makes them feel better about themselves, the same way that Main Street USA makes them feel better about the scary places where they actually live.

Page 274
Lately I am impressed by the number of educated people I meet who don't think about these issues and their implications. They may feel that there is something vaguely wrong with their homes, their neighborhoods, their cities, the whole physical arrangement of their lives. They may quietly yearn, like homesick children, to belong somewhere, to be members of real communities. But their feelings aren't moored to specific positive ideas about what it takes to make a good place. When I mentioned the things I have been writing about to my friends - middle aged people advanced in serious careers - they say, "Huh...?" as though I were describing life on another planet. 
     I am concerned because I don't think we will be able to have much of a civilization in the future unless we build proper places in which to dwell. And it seems unlikely that we will move to do this anytime soon in a conscious and systematic way.

Page 275
There is a reason that human beings long for a sense of permanence. This longing is not limited to children, for it touches the profoundest aspects of our existence: that life is short, fraught with uncertainty, and sometimes tragic. We know not where we come from, still less where we are going, and to keep from going crazy while we are here, we want to feel that we truly belong to a specific part of the world.