Quote

There are still an awful lot of intelligent, clever constructive Americans and they are still doing clever constructive things.

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
Awful
Intelligent
Americans
Stills
Still
Things
Constructive
Clever

More quotes by Jane Jacobs

Image
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.
Jane Jacobs
Image
Nothing is so clear in history that is it happens for any one thing. It seems that a lot of things come together to make great changes.
Jane Jacobs
Image
The notion that you could discard the old world and now make a new one. This is what was so bad about Modernism.
Jane Jacobs
Image
Empires want [cities] only to trade with the empire, which doesn't help them at all. It's just a way of exploiting them.
Jane Jacobs
Image
The best thing is not to think about [separatism]. [People in Alberta] don't even want to engage in talking pros and cons and why people feel this way.
Jane Jacobs
Image
To seek causes of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.
Jane Jacobs
Image
In our American cities, we need all kinds of diversity.
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
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 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.
Jane Jacobs
Image
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.
Jane Jacobs
Image
Almost nobody travels willingly from sameness to sameness and repetition to repetition, even if the physical effort required is trivial.
Jane Jacobs
Image
When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Planners are guided by principles derived from the behaviour and appearance of suburbs, tuberculosis sanatoria, fairs and imaginary dream cities - from anything but cities themselves.
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
Lots of things are not possible for municipalities, suburbs, or collections of them now. They are not possible and they would become possible, because they would have more authority. They would have the same authority as a province now.
Jane Jacobs
Image
To science, not even the bark of a tree or a drop of pond water is dull or a handful of dirt banal. They all arouse awe and wonder.
Jane Jacobs
Image
When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Because this is so, there is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities: a city cannot be a work of art.
Jane Jacobs
Image
Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles?
Jane Jacobs
Image
Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture.
Jane Jacobs
Image
There are dangers in sentimentalizing nature. Most sentimental ideas imply, at bottom, a deep if unacknowledged disrespect. It is no accident that we Americans, probably the world's champion sentimentalizers about nature, are at one and the same time probably the world's most voracious and disrespectful destroyers of wild and rural countryside.
Jane Jacobs