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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.

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
Wrong
Future
Trying
Always
People
Predict
Exists
Line
Lines

More quotes by Jane Jacobs

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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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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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[ 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.
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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.
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We expect too much of new # buildings , and too little of ourselves.
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People who think of themselves as exiles, I find, can never really put their lives together, really.
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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 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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Expanding the Toronto Island Airport will undermine the downtown's economy and liveability and intensify pollution and smog from Oshawa to Oakville. I urge Torontonians to close down this dangerous Trojan horse and get on with planning constructive and delightful ways of using our magnificent lakeside assets.
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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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Traffic congestion is caused by vehicles, not by people in themselves.
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New ideas often need old buildings.
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I think that intelligent people to a great extent are captives of their time or place.
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The best part of a Reg Hartt presentation is what he has to say.
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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?
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(The psuedoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success.)
Jane Jacobs
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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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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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Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities.
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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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