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In small settlements everyone knows your affairs. In the city everyone does not-only those you choose to tell will know about you. This is one of the attributes of cities that is precious to most city people.

Jane Jacobs

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Jane Jacobs
Age: 89 †
Born: 1916
Born: May 4
Died: 2006
Died: April 25
Author
Economist
Journalist
Sociologist
Urban Planner
Writer
Scranton
Pennsylvania
Jane Butzner
Jane Butzner Jacobs
People
Affair
City
Choose
Cities
Settlements
Small
Settlement
Everyone
Attributes
Tell
Affairs
Doe
Precious

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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.
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You don't get new products and services out of sameness.
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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.
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Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches.
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We expect too much of new # buildings , and too little of ourselves.
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This is what a city is, bits and pieces that supplement each other and support each other.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Empires want [cities] only to trade with the empire, which doesn't help them at all. It's just a way of exploiting them.
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Privately run jails are a mark of American reinvented government that has been picked up by neoconcervatives in Canada.
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[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.
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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.
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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.
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Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.
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A region is an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution.
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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.
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