Jane Jacobs Quotes

110 Sourced Quotes

Lots of things are not possible for municipalities, suburbs, or collections of them now. They are not possible and they would become possible, because they would have more authority. They would have the same authority as a province now.

Jane Jacobs
There are two ways you encounter things in the world that are different. One is everything that comes in reinforces what you already believe and everything that you know. The other thing is that you stay flexible enough or curious enough and maybe unsure of yourself enough, or may be you are more sure of yourself - I don't know which it is - that the new things that come in keep reforming your world view.

Jane Jacobs
Almost nobody travels willingly from sameness to sameness and repetition to repetition, even if the physical effort required is trivial.

Jane Jacobs
My husband was a hospital architect and he was working on some hospitals in Alberta, and I told him to try to find out what they thought about separatism. He would come back on weekends. He said "well, I think I found out how they feel about separatism. I brought it up at lunch in the cafeteria, and everybody at the table was silent and then somebody said 'Let's change the subject'."

Jane Jacobs
I still have a lot of family in America. I still have a lot of friends there. There is a lot that I admire there very much. When I find America getting too much criticized outside America, I want to tell them how many things are good about it.

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

Jane Jacobs
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.

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

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

Jane Jacobs
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.

Jane Jacobs
While you are looking, you might as well also listen, linger and think about what you see.

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

Jane Jacobs
The entrepreneurial investors of the time just want to repeat themselves indefinitely and don't know when to stop. You can't do that. And so finally the housing boom, or the auto boom, or whatever it is that's been carrying things along, runs out of customers.

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

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
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.

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

Jane Jacobs
By the end of the book, it is quite different than the way you thought it would be when you started the book - both in form and what it contains and what you think. Well, you tipped in a lot and you digested a lot - it wasn't pre-digested in your view. And it changed what you thought and how you see things.

Jane Jacobs
Artists, whatever their medium, make selections from the abounding materials of life, and organize these selections into works that are under the control of the artist.... In relation to the inclusiveness and literally endless intricacy of life, art is arbitrary, symbolic and abstracted. That is its value and the source of its own kind of order and coherence.

Jane Jacobs