Jane Jacobs (1916 – 2006)
American-born Canadian urbanist, writer and activist.
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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.
In wretched outcomes, the devil is in the details.
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.
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.
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.
Privately run jails are a mark of American "reinvented government" that has been picked up by neoconcervatives in Canada.
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.
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.
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.
Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture.
Credentialing, not education, has become the primary business of North American universities.
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.
Throughout the world Dark Ages have scrawled finis to successions of cultures receding far into the past.
A region is an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution.
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.
Redundancy is expensive but indispensable.
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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