Matt Ridley Quotes

Most of the so-called robber barons got rich by cutting the price of goods, not raising them.

Posterity can pay for its ancestors’ lives because posterity can be richer through innovation. If somebody somewhere takes out a mortgage, which he will repay in three decades’ time, to invest in a bu...

South Korea and Ghana had the same income per capita in the 1950s. One received far more aid, advice and political intervention than the other. It is now by far the poorer of the two. In general, Asia...

The Dark Ages were a massive experiment in the back-to-the-land hippy lifestyle (without the trust fund):

The filament of D N A is information, a message written in a codeof chemicals, one chemical for each letter. It is almost too good to betrue, but the code turns out to be written in a way that we can...

The market is a system of mass cooperation. You compete with rival producers, sure, but you cooperate with your customers, your suppliers and your colleagues. Commerce both needs and breeds trust.

The more prosperous and free that people become, the more their birth rate settles at around two children per woman with no coercion necessary.

The number of countries that censor the internet has grown steadily, and now stands at more than forty.

The war is not over, however. Even organisations like Wikipedia succumbed to the authoritarian twitch, appointing editors with special privileges who could impose their own prejudices upon certain top...

The wonderful thing about knowledge is that it is genuinely limitless. There is not even a theoretical possibility of exhausting the supply of ideas, discoveries and inventions.

This isn’t about auctions,’ said Meg Whitman, the chief executive of eBay, ‘in fact it’s not about economic warfare. It’s the opposite.’ It was survival of the nicest.

To those who do not accept miracles it seems more likely that the Koran is almost certainly a compilation of old texts, not a new document in the seventh century. It is like a lake into which many str...

We are perforce in some sense constrained, goaded, or at least affected by the accumulated impact of selective decisions made over thousands of generations.

We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth that still fills me with astonishment. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

What is miraculous is that in modern society you can trust and be trusted by a shopkeeper you do not know.

What is truly revolutionary about molecular biology in the post-Watson-Crick era is that it has become digital...the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like.' -Richard Dawkins

What was the secret that the serpent told Eve? That she could eat a certain fruit? Pah. That was a euphemism. The fruit was carnal knowledge, and everybody from Thomas Aquinas to Milton knew it. How d...

You are descended not from your mother but from her ovary. Nothing that happened to her body or her mind in her life could affect your nature

If sympathy allows you to please yourself by pleasing others, are you being selfish or altruistic?

What really works inside a big firm is division of labour: you do what you’re good at, I’ll do what I’m good at, and we’ll coordinate our actions. That is what actually happens in practice inside most...