Jane Jacobs Quotes

American–Canadian journalist, author, and activist (1916–2006)

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Jane Jacobs (4 May 1916 – 25 April 2006) was an American-born Canadian urbanist, writer and activist, most famous as author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), a powerful critique of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s in the United States. In 1968, Jacobs moved to Toronto, where she lived until her death.

Bio from: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Birth Name: Jane Butzner

Alternative Names: Jane Butzner Jacobs

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Redundancy is expensive but indispensable.

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.

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.

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.

Credentialing, not education, has become the primary business of North American universities.

I was brought up to believe that there is no virtue in conforming meekly to the dominant opinion of the moment. I was encouraged to believe that simple conformity results in stagnation for a society, and that American progress has been largely owing to the opportunity for experimentation, the leeway given initiative, and to a gusto and a freedom for chewing over odd ideas.

Beneficent spirals, operating by benign feedback, mean that everything needful is not required at once: each individual improvement is beneficial for the whole

In wretched outcomes, the devil is in the details.

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.

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?