Fields of Battle

Besides collecting quotes that champion idleness, I'm also always on the lookout for those championing messiness and chaos, my SOP.

Here's a British historian on the benefits of American disorganization:

"The [American system], though it may lay the seeds of discontent with prevailing government and organisation, fertilizes creativity. Education ought to be wasteful, as American education is. It ought to offer chances to the greatest possible number, and ought to offer them in manifold variety and over and over again.

"No social scientist ever born has been able to predict who will benefit from education or when. Some of the cleverest of my Oxford contemporaries... have disappeared without a trace.... I think of the successful Americans I have known with interest. Paul Sarbanes, the son of an immigrant Greek waiter, is a United States senator [et al.]....
There is no telling."

--From John Keegan, The Fields of Battle; The Wars for North America, Knopf, 1996, p. 47