Matt Ridley Quotes

Men have killed men much more often – on average about ninety-seven times more often – than women have killed women.

We all enjoy making other people happy. How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happin...

And the good news is that there is no inevitable end to this process. The more people are drawn into the global division of labour, the more people can specialise and exchange, the wealthier we will a...

As I write this, it is nine o’clock in the morning. In the two hours since I got out of bed I have showered in water heated by North Sea gas, shaved using an American razor running on electricity made...

Education is not a skyhook from which to hang economic policy; it is an emergent phenomenon.

Every class is unfit to govern.’ The problem is not the abuse of power, echoed the motivational speaker Michael Cloud more recently, but the power to abuse. The

George Washington said that ‘Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. Government is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant, and a fearful master.

Humanity is, of course, morally free to make and remake itself infinitely, but we do not do so.

I want to do for every aspect of the human world a little bit of what Charles Darwin did for biology, and get you to see past the illusion of design, to see the emergent, unplanned, inexorable and bea...

If culture consisted simply of learning habits from others, it would soon stagnate. For culture to turn cumulative, ideas needed to meet and mate.

If, as a professor, you ask four men and two women each to wear a cotton T-shirt, no deodorant and no perfume, for two nights, then hand these T-shirts to you, you will probably be humored as a mite k...

Imports are Christmas morning; exports are January’s MasterCard bill. P.J. O’ROURKE

In Germany too the preservation of nature went hand in hand with the destruction of human life. ‘Ask the trees, they will teach you how to become National Socialists!’ read one Nazi slogan.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Britain and the United States made huge contributions to science with negligible public funding, while Germany and France, with hefty public fundi...

Is it not striking that the cost of food and clothing has gone steadily downwards over the past fifty years, while the cost of healthcare and education has gone steadily upwards?

It is easier to wax elegiac for the life of a peasant when you do not have to use a long-drop toilet.

Jeff Bezos’s favourite saying is ‘Start with the customer and work backwards,’ but it is repeated as a mantra so frequently by his staff that you cannot help thinking they start with the boss and work...

Most species do not change their habits during their few million years on earth or alter their lifestyle much in different parts of their range.

Our habits and our institutions, from language to cities, are constantly changing, and the mechanism of change turns out to be surprisingly Darwinian: it is gradual, undirected, mutational, inexorable...

Political decisions are by definition monopolistic, disenfranchising and despotically majoritarian; markets are good at supplying minority needs.