Jane Jacobs quotes

Jane Jacobs was an American journalist, author, and urban activist renowned for her influence on urban studies and city planning. Her groundbreaking book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" challenged conventional thinking about city development. She advocated for community-centered urban design and remains an inspiration for city planners worldwide. Here are 63 of her quotes:

Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture.

Jane Jacobs

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.

Jane Jacobs

In wretched outcomes, the devil is in the details.

Jane Jacobs

The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.

Jane Jacobs

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

Privately run jails are a mark of American "reinvented government" that has been picked up by neoconservatives in Canada.

Jane Jacobs

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.

Jane Jacobs

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

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

Redundancy is expensive but indispensable.

Jane Jacobs

A region is an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution.

Jane Jacobs

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.

Jane Jacobs

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

Jane Jacobs

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

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.

Jane Jacobs

This is something everyone knows: A well-used city street is apt to be a safe street. A deserted city street is apt to be unsafe.

Jane Jacobs

We expect too much of new #‎ buildings, and too little of ourselves.

Jane Jacobs

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.

Jane Jacobs

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.

Jane Jacobs

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.

Jane Jacobs

I did have an inkling that I was going to be a writer. That was my intention.

Jane Jacobs

I was taught that the American's right to be a free individual, not at the mercy of the state, was hard-won and that its price was eternal vigilance, that I too would have to be vigilant.

Jane Jacobs