Hayao Miyazaki Quotes

... she called it a paper town. Like, you know, everything so fake and flimsy.

The Obama administration seems to be following what might be called 'the Detroit pattern increasing taxes, harassing businesses, and pandering to unions. In the short run, it got mayors re-elected. In the long-run, it reduced Detroit from a thriving city to an economic disaster area, whose population was cut in half, as its most productive citizens fled.

I covered the Lebanese civil war. I could see a place that had once been prosperous and now was impoverished. I'm not seeing that in America.

The industrial powerhouse of 1950 [Detroit] is now a crime-ridden wasteland with a functioning literacy rate equivalent to West African basket-cases.

I'm mad about being old and I'm mad about being American. Apart from that, OK.

It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things do work, but only what kind of quick, easy outer impression they give. If so, there is little hope for our cities or probably for much else in our society. But I do not think this is so.

When I'm in a city that's just clean, concrete lines, I get really short of breath and confused. It's much more interesting to me when nature is creeping back and tearing the mortar apart between the bricks.

Overall, white men run America. From nuclear armaments to the filth and jeopardy of New York City subways to the cruel mismanagement of health care, is there anything to boast about?

The trouble with the lost generation is that it didn't get lost enough.

Well, there were several things. One was that the industry itself built in Detroit was abandoning the city - taking factories elsewhere, the corporate headquarters elsewhere.

I'm tired of saying "How wonderful you are!" to fool men, who haven't got one half sense I've got.

And much it grieved my heart to think What man has made of man.

Even the human race can't claim to be natural anymore. We are fake, dying things. How fitting that I would end up in this sham of a marriage.

I miss that time. The cities back then, just after the forests died, were full of wonders, and you'd stumble on them--these princes of the air on common rooftops--the rivers that burst through the city streets so they ran like canals--the rabbits in parking garages--the deer foaling, nestled in Dumpsters like a Nativity.

Without a doubt. It's woven into our DNA in a very deep way and so to kind of be smacked in the face with the hypocrisy of the America that we were sold was a liberating and harsh experience.

Take back your insurance, baby, nothing is guaranteed. Take back your acid rain, let your TV bleed.

I’d like to see Manhattan underwater. I’d like to see when the human population plummets and there are no more high rises, because nobody’s buying them. I’m excited about that. Money and desire—all that is going to collapse, and wild green grasses are going to take over.

I won't deny the polemical elements in my work, but they are less in the service of attempting to reform human behavior than the delighted exercise of my rather malicious sense of humor - especially vis-a-vis the horrifying everyday environment we have produced for ourselves. These mall-scapes, burb-scapes, urban wildernesses, starchitect stunts, and other toxic contexts for our daily lives express about every human vice, stupidity, and blunder that it is possible for a society to make. It all leads, really, to a psychological place where only comedy or despair make sense.

I hate America. I hate this country. It’s just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word 'free' to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me. You come to room 1013 over at the hospital, I'll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean. I live in America, that’s hard enough, I don’t have to love it. You do that. Everybody’s got to love something.

The generality of friends puts us out of conceit with friendship; just as the generality of religious people puts us out of conceit with religion.

We see many instances of cities going down like sinking ships to their destruction. There have been such wrecks in the past and there surely will be others in the future, caused by the wickedness of captains and crews alike. For these are guilty men, whose sin is supreme ignorance of what matters most.

What is happening in Detroit is not good so I don't even want to be a part of that, but there is something on the other side that I may want to be a part of so I don't know yet.

I don't want to get depressed, I don't want to get down in the dumps, and I don't want to get teased with the idea that everything's rigged and everything's fake.

I'm increasingly on the side of thinkers like David Graeber who are talking back to this notion of totality and emphasizing how there are all kinds of moments in our daily lives that break - or at least could break - from the logic of profit and the modes of domination it entails. Zones of freedom, even if it's never pure.