Jane Jacobs Quotes

110 Sourced Quotes

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

Jane Jacobs
Streets and their sidewalks-the main public places of a city-are its most vital organs.

Jane Jacobs
I think that may be the biggest difference between Americans and people elsewhere. Unlike Americans, Canadians know that there are places just as real as Canada. It's a self-centeredness that's a very strange thing.

Jane Jacobs
Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design.

Jane Jacobs
The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.

Jane Jacobs
I did have an inkling that I was going to be a writer. That was my intention.

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

Jane Jacobs
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.

Jane Jacobs
There are some architects, mostly working on hospitals and industrial buildings, who understand the importance of flexibility in a building. These are places where people know that buildings need to change with changes in technology, but this understanding has yet to filter down to those designing most of the ordinary buildings in our cities.

Jane Jacobs
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
The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so.

Jane Jacobs
Observation of realities has never, to put it mildly, been one of the strengths of economic development theory.

Jane Jacobs
I think what's happened to Los Angeles is much more promising than if the city had held onto the big defense contracts and aerospace jobs. That might have been called stability, but it would have been foretelling a great abyss for the future.

Jane Jacobs
People must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other.

Jane Jacobs
Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.

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

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

Jane Jacobs
By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.

Jane Jacobs
I have been dwelling upon downtowns. This is not because mixtures of primary uses are unneeded elsewhere in cities. On the contrary they are needed, and the success of mixtures downtown (on in the most intensive portions of cities, whatever they are called) is related to the mixture possible in other part of cities.

Jane Jacobs
Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of settlements (except dream cities) have problems. Big cities have difficulties in abundance, because they have people in abundance.

Jane Jacobs
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.

Jane Jacobs
Why did I become a Canadian citizen? Not because I was rejecting being a U.S. citizen. At the time when I became a Canadian citizen, you couldn't be a dual citizen. Now you can. So I had to be one or the other. But the reason I became a Canadian citizen was because it simply seemed so abnormal to me not to be able to vote.

Jane Jacobs
It is immoral for powerless people to accept this powerlessness. They may not succeed in getting power but they can fight for it, and if enough fight for it, it makes it very difficult for the people with the big sticks.

Jane Jacobs
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
A region is an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution.

Jane Jacobs