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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Jane Jacobs

Image
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?
Jane Jacobs
Image
...frequent streets and short blocks are valuable because of the fabric of intricate cross-use that they permit among the users of a city neighbouhood.
Jane Jacobs
Image
(The psuedoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success.)
Jane Jacobs
Image
Credentialing, not education, has become the primary business of North American universities.
Jane Jacobs
Image
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
Image
Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities.
Jane Jacobs
Image
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.
Jane Jacobs
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I think that things are going to change just because people get too damn bored with what they have.
Jane Jacobs
Image
Privately run jails are a mark of American reinvented government that has been picked up by neoconcervatives in Canada.
Jane Jacobs
Image
Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.
Jane Jacobs
Image
[ René Lévesque] didn't understand why things do collapse. It's usually a very banal reason why things do collapse. It's not a grand reason, why they collapse economically, at least in the West.
Jane Jacobs
Image
We expect too much of new # buildings , and too little of ourselves.
Jane Jacobs
Image
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.
Jane Jacobs
Image
All my life I have been hearing that the oil was going to run out. It never happens. They keep discovering new oil fields. The world is apparently floating in oil fields.
Jane Jacobs
Image
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.
Jane Jacobs
Image
Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture.
Jane Jacobs
Image
The second mode to deal with unsafe cities is to take refuge in vehicles. This is the technique practiced in the big wild-animal reservations of Africa, where tourists are warned to leave their cars under no circumstances until they reach a lodge. It is also the technique practiced in Los Angeles.
Jane Jacobs
Image
Throughout the world Dark Ages have scrawled finis to successions of cultures receding far into the past.
Jane Jacobs