Jane Jacobs Quotes
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We must demonstrate that it is possible to overcome poverty, misery and decay by democratic means, and we must ourselves believe, and must show others, that our American tradition of the dignity and liberty of the individual is not a luxury for easy times but is the basic source of the strength and security of a successful society.
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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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Privately run jails are a mark of American 'reinvented government' that has been picked up by neoconservatives in Canada.
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It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things do work, but only what kind of quick, easy outer impression they give. If so, there is little hope for our cities or probably for much else in our society. But I do not think this is so.
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The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.
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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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Subsidiarity is the principle that government works best - most responsibly and responsively - when it is closest to the people it serves and the needs it addresses. Fiscal accountability is the principle that institutions collecting and disbursing taxes work most responsibly when they are transparent to those providing the money.
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Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches.
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Advanced cultures are usually sophisticated enough, or have been sophisticated enough at some point in their pasts, to realize that foxes shouldn't be relied on to guard henhouses.
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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.
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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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Beneficent spirals, operating by benign feedback, mean that everything needful is not required at once: each individual improvement is beneficial for the whole
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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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Virtually all ideologues, of any variety, are fearful and insecure, which is why they are drawn to ideologies that promise prefabricated answers for all circumstances.
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Credentialing, not education, has become the primary business of North American universities.
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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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Great cities are not like towns, only larger. They are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of them is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.
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I did have an inkling that I was going to be a writer. That was my intention.
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Design is people.
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Redundancy is expensive but indispensable.
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In wretched outcomes, the devil is in the details.
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There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.
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Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture.
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A region is an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution.