Jane Jacobs Quotes

A nation's path to greatness lies in its economic prowess and ... militarism, empire, and aggression lead to a dead end.

Empires want [cities] only to trade with the empire, which doesn't help them at all. It's just a way of exploiting them.

Marxism is an interpretation of history which explains the progress of society as a product of the expansion of the forces of production of the material means of life, that is, the development of economy.

We don’t like to call ourselves an empire but in the process of becoming the richest country the world has ever known we have dominated many other people.

The jury is still out, and may always be out over whether the Britain benefited from the Empire or not.

Existing colonial empires rest upon insecure foundations. There seems, indeed, something unnatural in the spectacle of seven million Dutch ruling over fifty million Malays.

With nearly every great European empire today walks its dark colonial shadow …

In the early colonial period the commerce of Mexico was monopolized by Spain, and this has been the explanation given by most writers for the backwardness of Mexico. They do not seem to know that England monopolized the commerce of her American colonies more strictly than ever Spain did hers. The problem, therefore, is to explain why, as soon as the English colonies were independent, they began sending their ships all over the world, while Mexico could not find any better use for her independence than closing the country to foreign trade by a prohibitive tariff.

The U.K. is outward-looking, trade-oriented, growth-oriented, and we do not have enough of that storyline, that tradition, that culture within the European Union.

The evil of predatory global capitalism and empire has spawned the evil of terrorism

In the eyes of empire builders men are not men but instruments.

People are working hard in the USA to make things. And I want to help them do it even more.

Most of the nations that have serious gardening cultures have, or had, empires. You can't have this luxury of pleasure without somebody paying for it. This is nice to know. It's nice to know that when you sit down to enjoy a plate of strawberries, somebody got paid very little so that you could have your strawberries. It doesn't mean the strawberries will taste different, but it's nice to enjoy things less than we do. We enjoy things far too much, and it leads to incredible pain and suffering.

It looks perverted and wasteful to us, but then one thing that empires are not about is the efficient use of resources and the spread of happiness; both are typically accomplished despite the economic short-circuiting - corruption and favoritism, mostly- endemic to the system.

We better rethink the position of the United States in the world and whether we want to be an empire. Being an empire puts all of us in jeopardy. The American Empire, while it was just wreaking havoc on other nations, didn't bother us.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Let us never forget the greatest untapped market for American enterprise is right here in America, in the inner cities, in the rural areas.

Any time someone says "that's it, I'm leaving" I ask them whether they'd prefer to live under US domestic policy, or US foreign policy. As bad as things get inside an empire, they're usually worse in the protectorates.

I really want to focus on economic growth and growing the economy.

People who had empires, unfortunately, want them back eventually, somehow, someway.

This agglomeration which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

Thailand's economic development was driven by educational expansion. That has been a very dramatic factor, and South Asia had been pretty miserable in not learning from that experience.

I want to get America's private sector growing and I know how to do it.

We have weakened our economy in America. We need a strong economy.

Trade is good for the economy. Trade creates growth. The problem is that it creates growth but it does not think about distribution of the benefits of that growth.