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

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...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.
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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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Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles?
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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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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.
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There is no new world that you make without the old world.
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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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Some men tend to cling to old intellectual excitements, just as some belles, when they are old ladies, still cling to the fashions and coiffures of their exciting youth.
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In our American cities, we need all kinds of diversity.
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Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches.
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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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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.
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There are fashions in building. Behind the fashions lie economic and technological reasons, and these fashions exclude all but a few genuinely different possibilities in city dwelling construction at any one time.
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Almost nobody travels willingly from sameness to sameness and repetition to repetition, even if the physical effort required is trivial.
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Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities.
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Never underestimate the power of a city to regenerate.
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observation of realities has never, to put it mildly, been one of the strengths of economic development theory.
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A border--the perimeter of a single massive or stretched-out use of territory--forms the edge of an area of 'ordinary' city. Often borders are thought of as passive objects, or matter-of-factly just as edges. However, a border exerts an active influence.
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One of our troubles is that we try to make municipalities that are totally different from each other all act as if they were the same kind of creature, with the same kinds of possibilities.
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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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