A Quote by Melvyn Bragg

History is too often the refuge of the tidy-minded, making neat patterns when the dust has settled.

Melvyn Bragg

Quote Topics

Dust History Making Minded Neat Often Patterns Refuge Settled Tidy Too

Quote Author

Melvyn Bragg
English - Journalist
Born: October 6, 1939

The Germans are often too bureaucratic, too fixated on rules and not risk-oriented enough. And some of their officials have the feeling that they need to make everything in the cityscape look nice and pretty as quickly as possible. That was particularly apparent in the former East Germany after reunification. Then cities sometimes get a bit too neat and tidy.

Charles Landry

There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. what we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish. There is no free will. There are no variables.

Chuck Palahniuk

The play of conflicting interests in a framework of shared purposes is the drama of a free society. It is a robust exercise, and often a noisy one. It is not for the faint-hearted, or the tidy-minded.

John W. Gardner

I'm a tidy, neat person. But I'm not a maniac.

Jamie Lee Curtis

It's important to look neat and tidy and not be too flashily dressed. If you look untidy, you're considered to have an untidy mind - it's as simple as that!

Lynda Chalker, Baroness Chalker of Wallasey

The world isn't tidy; it's a mess. I don't try to make it neat.

Garry Winogrand

There are only patterns. Patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns, patterns hidden by patterns, patterns within patterns.

Chuck Palahniuk

I have a neat and tidy bed when I reach home but a cluttered one by the time I leave.

Kirti Kulhari

Epidemiologists study patterns in order to combat infection. Stories about epidemics follow patterns, too. Stories aren't often deadly, but they can be virulent: spreading fast, weakening resistance, wreaking havoc.

Jill Lepore

I guess they needed a maze in Japan, where everything's neat and tidy. In America everybody's already wandering around lost.

Jonathan Lethem

Epidemiologists study patterns in order to combat infection. Stories about epidemics follow patterns, too. Stories arent often deadly, but they can be virulent: spreading fast, weakening resistance, wreaking havoc.

Jill Lepore

No game in the world is as tidy and dramatically neat as baseball, with cause and effect, crime and punishment, motive and result, so cleanly defined.

Paul Gallico

Religion is all-too-often a refuge for scoundrels.

Neal Boortz

If you insist on playing Jorginho, who is neat and tidy but not a goal threat, you have to have goal threats on either side of him.

Graeme Souness

Measurement has too often been the leitmotif of many investigations rather than the experimental examination of hypotheses. Mounds of data are collected, which are statistically decorous and methodologically unimpeachable, but conclusions are often trivial and rarely useful in decision making. This results from an overly rigorous control of an insignificant variable and a widespread deficiency in the framing of pertinent questions. Investigators seem to have settled for what is measurable instead of measuring what they would really like to know.