Jane Jacobs Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Jane Jacobs's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Journalist Jane Jacobs's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 148 quotes on this page collected since May 4, 1916! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
  • Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles?

    Jane Jacobs (2016). “Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs”, p.84, Random House
  • Automobiles are often conveniently tagged as the villains responsible for the ills of cities and the disappointments and futilities of city planning. But the destructive effect of automobiles are much less a cause than a symptom of our incompetence at city building.

    Jane Jacobs (2016). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, p.7, Vintage
  • 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?

    "Dark Age Ahead". Book by Jane Jacobs, Chapter One, The Hazard, p. 4, 2004.
  • To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.

    Jane Jacobs (2016). “The Economy of Cities”, p.120, Vintage
  • 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 (2007). “Dark Age Ahead”, p.179, Vintage
  • Traffic congestion is caused by vehicles, not by people in themselves.

    Jane Jacobs (2016). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, p.229, Vintage
  • Nations are political and military entities, and so are blocs of nations. But it doesn't necessarily follow from this that they are also the basic, salient entities of economic life or that they are particularly useful for probing the mysteries of economic structure, the reasons for rise and decline of wealth. Indeed, the failure of national governments and blocs of nations to force economic life to do their bidding suggests some sort of essential irrelevance.

    Jane Jacobs (2016). “Cities and the Wealth of Nations”, p.39, Vintage
  • [Cities] are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.

    Jane Jacobs (2016). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, p.30, Vintage
  • Americans don't really think that other places are as real as America.

    Source: www.metropolismag.com
  • Almost nobody travels willingly from sameness to sameness and repetition to repetition, even if the physical effort required is trivial.

    Jane Jacobs (2016). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, p.129, Vintage
  • New ideas often need old buildings.

  • My mother used to say when we were children, 'When a boy gets a stick in his hand, his brains run out the other end of it.' Power is a stick in the hand, and I have never heard of anybody who wielded a very big stick of power whose brains did not run out the other end. As a nation, our brains are running out the other end of our power right now.

  • Cities never flourish alone. They have to be trading with other cities. My new hypothesis shows why. But also in trading with each other they can't be in too different stages of development, and they can't copy one another.

    Source: aqi.quebec
  • 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.

  • Intricate minglings of different uses in cities are not a form of chaos. On the contrary, they represent a complex and highly developed form of order.

    Jane Jacobs (2016). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, p.222, Vintage
  • Designing a dream city is easy; rebuilding a living one takes imagination.

    Jane Jacobs (2016). “Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs”, p.129, Random House
  • There are still an awful lot of intelligent, clever constructive Americans and they are still doing clever constructive things.

    Interview with James Kunstler for Metropolis Magazine, March 2001.
  • 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.

    Source: www.metropolismag.com
  • There is no new world that you make without the old world.

    Interview with James Kunstler for Metropolis Magazine, March 2001.
  • The primary conflict, I think, is between people whose interests are with already well-established economic activities, and those whose interests are with the emergence of new economic activities.

    Jane Jacobs (2016). “The Economy of Cities”, p.249, Vintage
  • (The psuedoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success.)

    Jane Jacobs (2016). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, p.183, Vintage
  • 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 (2007). “Dark Age Ahead”, p.103, Vintage
  • 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.

    Source: www.metropolismag.com
  • observation of realities has never, to put it mildly, been one of the strengths of economic development theory.

    Jane Jacobs (2016). “Cities and the Wealth of Nations”, p.10, Vintage
  • The more successfully a city mingles everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday streets, the more successfully, casually (and economically) its people thereby enliven and support well-located parks that can thus give back grace and delight to their neighborhoods instead of vacuity.

    Giving  
    Jane Jacobs (2016). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, p.111, Vintage
  • 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.

  • 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.

    Source: aqi.quebec
  • 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 (2007). “Dark Age Ahead”, p.115, Vintage
  • 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 (2007). “Dark Age Ahead”, p.65, Vintage
  • 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.

    Source: www.metropolismag.com
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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 148 quotes from the Journalist Jane Jacobs, starting from May 4, 1916! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!