Jane Jacobs Quotes

Given the fragility of contemporary civil and urban life … our problem is to solve the puzzle of how to live together in healthy, diverse communities.

Neighborhood is a word that has come to sound like a Valentine. As a sentimental concept, 'neighborhood' is harmful to city planning. It leads to attempts at warping city life into imitations of town or suburban life. Sentimentality plays with sweet intentions in place of good sense.

A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.

It's very important for us all to understand that we are interconnected and we need to hold hands together, especially when the going gets tough.

City planning finds its validation in the intuitive recognition that a burgeoning market society can not be trusted to produce spontaneously a habitable, sanitary, or even efficient city, much less a beautiful one.

Of course, I had a paradigm of a certain city in my head when I wrote these stories, a city that inspired my imagination, but it was only inspiration.

Cities are never random. No matter how chaotic they might seem, everything about them grows out of a need to solve a problem

Taken altogether, Washington as a city is most unsatisfactory, and falls more grievously short of the thing attempted than any other of the great undertakings of which I have seen anything in the United States.

The single most important thing a city can do is provide a community where interesting, smart people want to live with their families.

When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Planners are guided by principles derived from the behaviour and appearance of suburbs, tuberculosis sanatoria, fairs and imaginary dream cities - from anything but cities themselves.

A city should be built to give its inhabitants security and happiness

Place has always been important to me, and one thing today's Chicago exudes, as it did in 1893, is a sense of place. I fell in love with the city, the people I encountered, and above all the lake and its moods, which shift so readily from season to season, day to day, even hour to hour.

A city is a place that can offer maximum freedom. Otherwise it’s incomplete.

Vital to quality of life is the ability to work together, learn from each other, and help each other grow.

New York City is filled with the same kind of people I left New Jersey to get away from.

Acting is a bit like tennis in that you can't really do it on your own.

The coach is the team, and the team is the coach. You reflect each other.

There's really no honor in proving that you can carry the entire load on your own shoulders. Andit's lonely.

We're all in this together is a far better philosophy than you're on your own.

Life is better when you share it.

Togetherness, for me, means teamwork. In my business of motion pictures and television entertainment, many minds and skillful hands must collaborate...T he work seeks to comprehend the spiritual and material needs and yearnings of gregarious humanity. It makes us reflect how completely dependent we are upon one another in our social and commercial life.

Isolation is a blind alley....Nothing on the planet grows except by convergence.

I like any big city. I like any place where you can see a guy with a pants-full of pooh fighting a ghost.

One cannot completely avoid this landmark character with large buildings such as these. But the city itself is also gigantic.