Jane Jacobs Quotes

The past is what provides us with the building blocks. Our job today is to create new buildings out of them.

The world changes, but I want that change to be necessary or respectful of what has happened before. Everything changes, and that's quite right.

The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.To "see the light" too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.

One does not substitute oneself for the past, one merely adds to it a new link.

We need to open up the future. We also need to keep everything valuable from the past.

Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies.

The thing is, we've changed our style but we've never changed the actual roots of what we've done.

We emphasize that we believe in change because we were born of it, we have lived by it, we prospered and grew great by it. So the status quo has never been our god, and we ask no one else to bow down before it.

The future will be the child of the past and the present, even if a rebellious child.

Slumber not in the tents of your fathers. The world is advancing.

The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.

Tradition, by its very nature, includes continuous change.

The world has changed a great deal, and our posture must change with it.

Progress knows nothing of fixity. It cannot be pressed into a definite mould…. Progress is ever renewing, ever becoming, ever changing--never is it within the law.

The American Dream can no more remain static than can the American nation.... We cannot any longer take an old approach to world problems. They aren't the same problems. It isn't the same world. We must not adopt the methods of our ancestors; instead, we must emulate that pioneer quality in our ancestors that made them attempt new methods for a New World.

We live in a quickly changing world, therefore we must foretell developments, and reforms should respond to these changes

I know that without change there would be no progress, but I am not going to mistake mere change for progress.

Everything evolves, not just music.

We should not fear what is new, but we should not throw out that which is in the past but is still valuable.

Change makes us confront the great unknown. It introduces different things into our lives. Different places. Different ideas. Different people. It's all hard to accept at times, and change can often be a little scary. But if there's one fact that I've learned from raising a family, from running several businesses, from serving in Congress and now as Governor, it's that nothing has ever grown without changing.

We cannot go backward,' Marco says. 'A great deal is not how it used to be.

We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of inertia and the irksomeness of action.

I think continuity is a good thing. But change is sometimes good, too.

And if things always stayed the same, Scarlett, what would be the reason for bothering to draw breath?