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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.

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
Show
Shows
Better
Kind
Things
Specialize
Think
Fatal
Thinking
Diverse
Kinds

More quotes by Jane Jacobs

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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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One wonders at the docility of the students who evidently must be satisfied enough with the credentials to be uncaring about the lack of education.
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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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Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities.
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Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.
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Empires want [cities] only to trade with the empire, which doesn't help them at all. It's just a way of exploiting them.
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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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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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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.
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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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I have been dwelling upon downtowns. This is not because mixtures of primary uses are unneeded elsewhere in cities. On the contrary they are needed, and the success of mixtures downtown (on in the most intensive portions of cities, whatever they are called) is related to the mixture possible in other part of cities.
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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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Today barbarism has taken over many city streets, or people fear it has, which comes to much the same thing in the end.
Jane Jacobs
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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?
Jane Jacobs
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Whenever and wherever societies have flourished and prospered rather than stagnated and decayed, creative and workable cities have been at the core of the phenomenon. Decaying cities, declining economies, and mounting social troubles travel together. The combination is not coincidental.
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Reactions [on my 1979 Massey lectures] were from Anglophones. I'm one. But I'm terrible at French. In fact, there was practically no reaction.
Jane Jacobs
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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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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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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
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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