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Jane Jacobs

25 quotes

“I did have an inkling that I was going to be a writer. That was my intention.”
Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) first seen 2000 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview in Toronto Canada (6 September 2000), by Jim Kunstler, Metropolis Magazine (March 2001)
“I was brought up to believe that there is no virtue in conforming meekly to the dominant opinion of the moment. I was encouraged to believe that simple conformity results in stagnation for a society, and that American progress has been largely owing to the opportunity for experimentation, the leeway given initiative, and to a gusto and a freedom for chewing over odd ideas.”
Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was taught that the American's right to be a free individual, not at the mercy of the state, was hard-won and that its price was eternal vigilance, that I too would have to be vigilant. I was made to feel that it would be a disgrace to me, as an individual, if I should not value or should give up rights that were dearly bought. I am grateful for that upbringing.”
Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We must demonstrate that it is possible to overcome poverty, misery and decay by democratic means, and we must ourselves believe, and must show others, that our American tradition of the dignity and liberty of the individual is not a luxury for easy times but is the basic source of the strength and security of a successful society.”
Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Great cities are not like towns, only larger. They are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of them is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.”
Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A region is an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution.”
Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As for really new ideas of any kind—no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be—there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.”
Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The salient mystery of Dark Ages sets the stage for mass amnesia. People living in vigorous cultures typically treasure those cultures and resist any threat to them. How and why can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes vitally lost?”
Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture.”
Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“While politicians, clergy, creators of advertisements, and other worthies assert stoutly that the family is the foundation of society, the nuclear family, as an institution, is currently in grave trouble.”
Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Credentialing, not education, has become the primary business of North American universities.”
Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To science, not even the bark of a tree or a drop of pond water is dull or a handful of dirt banal. They all arouse awe and wonder.”
Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One wonders at the docility of the students who evidently must be satisfied enough with the credentials to be uncaring about the lack of education.”
Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Subsidiarity is the principle that government works best — most responsibly and responsively — when it is closest to the people it serves and the needs it addresses. Fiscal accountability is the principle that institutions collecting and disbursing taxes work most responsibly when they are transparent to those providing the money.”
Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Virtually all ideologues, of any variety, are fearful and insecure, which is why they are drawn to ideologies that promise prefabricated answers for all circumstances.”
Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Advanced cultures are usually sophisticated enough, or have been sophisticated enough at some point in their pasts, to realize that foxes shouldn't be relied on to guard henhouses.”
Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In wretched outcomes, the devil is in the details.”
Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Redundancy is expensive but indispensable.”
Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Beneficent spirals, operating by benign feedback, mean that everything needful is not required at once: each individual improvement is beneficial for the whole”
Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have learned yet again (this has been going on all my life) what folly it is to take any thing for granted without examining it skeptically.”
Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Privately run jails are a mark of American "reinvented government" that has been picked up by neoconservatives in Canada.”
Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I would spend a nickel on the subway and go arbitrarily to some other stop and look around there. So I was roaming the city in the afternoons and applying for jobs in the morning. And one day I found myself in a neighborhood I just liked so much…it was one of those times I had put a nickel in and just invested something. And where did I get out? I just liked the sound of the name: Christopher Street — so I got out at Christopher Street, and I was enchanted with this neighborhood, and walked around it all afternoon and then I rushed back to Brooklyn. And I said, "Betty I found out where we have to live.”
Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) first seen 2000 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview in Toronto Canada (6 September 2000), by Jim Kunstler, Metropolis Magazine (March 2001)
“The other threat to the security of our tradition, I believe, lies at home. It is the current fear of radical ideas and of people who propound them. I do not agree with the extremists of either the left or the right, but I think they should be allowed to speak and to publish, both because they themselves have, and ought to have, rights, and once their rights are gone, the rights of the rest of us are hardly safe. Extremists typically want to squash not only those who disagree with them diametrically, but those who disagree with them at all. It seems to me that in every country where extremists of the left have gotten sufficiently in the saddle to squash the extremists of the right, they have ridden on to squash the center or terrorize it also. And the same goes for extremists of the right. I do not want that to happen in our country.”
Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is both a gloomy and a hopeful book. The subject itself is gloomy. A Dark Age is a culture's dead end. We in North America and Western Europe, enjoying the many benefits of the culture conventionally known as the West, customarily think of a Dark Age as happening once, long ago, following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. But in North America we live in a graveyard of lost aboriginal cultures, many of which were decisively finished off by mass amnesia in which even the memory of what was lost was also lost. Throughout the world Dark Ages have scrawled finis to successions of cultures receding far into the past.”
Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source