There are dangers in sentimentalizing nature. Most sentimental ideas imply, at bottom, a deep if unacknowledged disrespect. It is no accident that we Americans, probably the world’s champion sentimentalizers about nature, are at one and the same time probably the world’s most voracious and disrespectful destroyers of wild and rural countryside.

Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) American-Canadian journalist, author, urban theorist, activist

The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Part 4, ch. 22 (1961)
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