Matt Ridley Quotes

One survey shows that throughout the world and throughout history, from thirteenth-century England to modern Canada, from Kenya to Mexico, men have killed men much more often – on average about ninety...

The message from history is so blatantly obvious – that free trade causes mutual prosperity while protectionism causes poverty – that it seems incredible that anybody ever thinks otherwise.

For more than two hundred years, on the topic of human population, a disturbingly vicious thread has run through Western history, basing itself on biology and justifying cruelty on an almost unimagina...

Obama himself may have turned out to be something of a dud, but the cult of presidential personality that has dominated American politics for decades now still persists.

Nobody ever saw a dog make fair and deliberate exchange of a bone with another dog.

For most of history, the state has been an ‘ever-present predator and all-around abuser of human rights’,

The new and crucial ingredient was not the availability of capital, but the advent of market-tested, consumer-driven innovation.

Further evidence for the man-made nature of gods comes from their evolutionary history. It is a little-known fact, but gods evolve.

Good institutions cannot usually be imposed from above: that way they are oxymorons.

The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella).

The struggle for existence never gets easier. However well a species may adapt to its environment, it can never relax, because its competitors and its enemies are also adapting to their niches. Surviv...

Europe was, in Joel Mokyr’s words, ‘the first society to build an economy on non-human power rather than on the backs of slaves and coolies’.

The success of trust-based peer organizations such as eBay, Wikipedia, and the open-source movement, indicates that trust is a highly expandable network property.

Modern philosophers who aspire to rise above the sordid economic reality of the world would do well to recall that this trade made possible the cross-fertilisation of ideas that led to great discoveri...

Henry’s novel The Portrait of a Lady was written in thrall to Darwin’s idea of female choice as a force in evolution.

Trying to replace the common law with a rationally designed law is, he jests, like trying to design a better rhinoceros in a laboratory.

Each person ‘intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many oth...

Lectures, says Minerva’s Stephen Kosslyn, are ‘a great way to teach, but a terrible way to learn’.

The whole point of science, the whole thrust of the Enlightenment, is the rejection of arguments from authority.

Nature has never found human incomprehension a reason for changing her methods.