Quote

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.

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
Power
Corrupt
Persons
Usual
Person
Supposed
Much
Gets
Think
Stupid
Thinking
Word
Sense
Reality
Unrealistic

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People who try to predict the future by extrapolating in a line of more of what exists - they are always wrong.
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There are still an awful lot of intelligent, clever constructive Americans and they are still doing clever constructive things.
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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.
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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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Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities.
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In our American cities, we need all kinds of diversity.
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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.
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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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I think that intelligent people to a great extent are captives of their time or place.
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Lowly, unpurposeful and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city's wealth of public life may grow.
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There is no new world that you make without the old world.
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Streets and their sidewalks-the main public places of a city-are its most vital organs.
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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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Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.
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Some of the large [municipalities] in Quebec can contain within them most of the answers to their own practical problems. And so lots of different possibilities for doing things in a practical and different way become available.
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You don't get new products and services out of sameness.
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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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Credentialing, not education, has become the primary business of North American universities.
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Throughout the world Dark Ages have scrawled finis to successions of cultures receding far into the past.
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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.
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