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[ 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

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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
Reason
Economically
Things
Collapse
Grand
West
Usually
Least
Understand
Didn
Banal

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Credentialing, not education, has become the primary business of North American universities.
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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.
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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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To seek causes of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.
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While politicians, clergy, creators of advertisements, and other worthies assert stoutly that the family is the foundation of society, the nuclear family, as an institution, is currently in grave trouble.
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In our American cities, we need all kinds of diversity.
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I get absolutely ruthless in my own way about not doing anything else when I am trying to concentrate on writing a book. I have to stick to it and concentrate.
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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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There is no new world that you make without the old world.
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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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Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture.
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Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.
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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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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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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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There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.
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