Jane Jacobs Quotes

I am ambivalent about London because I am so ambivalent about England in general.

Power is supposed to be so corrupt. I don't think it's so much corrupt, in the usual sense of the word, as stupid and unrealistic. The more power a person has, the further he gets from reality.

Some men tend to cling to old intellectual excitements, just as some belles, when they are old ladies, still cling to the fashions and coiffures of their exciting youth.

Innovating economies expand and develop. Economies that do not add new kinds of goods and services, but continue only to repeat old work, do not expand much nor do they, by definition, develop.

Nothing is so clear in history that is it happens for any one thing. It seems that a lot of things come together to make great changes.

I think that things are going to change just because people get too damn bored with what they have.

I don't think of the New Urbanism as an economic or political train wreck. I think of it as one of these great generational upheavals that's coming.

Credentialing, not education, has become the primary business of North American universities.

Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches.

There were lots of programs over the course of the two referendums and the general tenor of them was that if Quebec were to separate, then Canada would disintegrate.

In wretched outcomes, the devil is in the details.

I think it is fatal to specialize. And all kinds of things show us that and that the more diverse we are in what we can do, the better.

The best thing is not to think about [separatism]. [People in Alberta] don't even want to engage in talking pros and cons and why people feel this way.

You don't get new products and services out of sameness.

[ René Lévesque] didn't understand why things do collapse. It's usually a very banal reason why things do collapse. It's not a grand reason, why they collapse economically, at least in the West.

Backward cities, or younger cities, or newly forming cities in supply regions, have to develop to a great extent on one another's shoulders. This is one of the terrible things about empires.

Unfortunately [René] Lévesque had so little self confidence in Quebec and in the people themselves, that he fell for that and, yes, he'd say, you know, it might be ruinous for us economically.

Maybe part of my animus against the English is the way they have always treated the Irish and they way they still think about the Irish.

That was the fear that there would be no identity anymore, for Canada. It was foolish, because there are so many examples of separatism, and nothing has disintegrated, unless they went to war.

People who think of themselves as exiles, I find, can never really put their lives together, really.

Americans have got it so dinged into them that they are the most fortunate people on Earth, and that the rest of the world - the sooner it copies what America is like, the better.

I get absolutely ruthless in my own way about not doing anything else when I am trying to concentrate on writing a book. I have to stick to it and concentrate.

I am not any hate-America person. I really came here for positive reasons.

The Victorian house and lots of other buildings weren't oppressive in themselves. They were often very airy and gingerbready and fancy. But they were associated with all this [Victorian] stuffiness.

The best part of a Reg Hartt presentation is what he has to say.

Privately run jails are a mark of American "reinvented government" that has been picked up by neoconcervatives in Canada.

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.

Throughout the world Dark Ages have scrawled finis to successions of cultures receding far into the past.

Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.

Reactions [on my 1979 Massey lectures] were from Anglophones. I'm one. But I'm terrible at French. In fact, there was practically no reaction.

[If Quebec became sovereign] there would be one level of government that would be missing, one less level of government. The municipality would become the second level.

Americans don't really think that other places are as real as America.

It may be romantic to search for the salves of society's ills in slow-moving rustic surroundings, or among innocent, unspoiled provincials, if such exist, but it is a waste of time.

Empires want [cities] only to trade with the empire, which doesn't help them at all. It's just a way of exploiting them.

All my life I have been hearing that the oil was going to run out. It never happens. They keep discovering new oil fields. The world is apparently floating in oil fields.

Beneficent spirals, operating by benign feedback, mean that everything needful is not required at once: each individual improvement is beneficial for the whole

One of our troubles is that we try to make municipalities that are totally different from each other all act as if they were the same kind of creature, with the same kinds of possibilities.

The notion that you could discard the old world and now make a new one. This is what was so bad about Modernism.

I think that intelligent people to a great extent are captives of their time or place.

People who try to predict the future by extrapolating in a line of more of what exists - they are always wrong.

I was so grateful to be independent of the academic establishment. I thought, how awful it would be to have my future hinge on such people and such decisions.

Cities never flourish alone. They have to be trading with other cities.

Most sentimental ideas imply, at bottom, a deep if unacknowledged disrespect.

We expect too much of new buildings, and too little of ourselves.

Design is people.