Top 250 Matt Ridley Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Futurology always ends up telling you more about your own time than about the future.”

— Matt Ridley

2. “Genes are biochemical recipes written in a four-letter alphabet called DNA.”

— Matt Ridley

3. “The genome is a book that wrote itself, continually adding, deleting and amending over four billion years.”

— Matt Ridley

4. “At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.”

— Matt Ridley

5. “It is not a zero sum game. The simple idea of the gains from trade lies at the heart of the modern and the ancient economy, not the power of capital. There is nothing else to it.”

— Matt Ridley

6. “Trade is 10 times as old as farming.”

— Matt Ridley

7. “Our minds have been built by selfish genes, but they have been built to be social, trustworthy and cooperative.”

— Matt Ridley

8. “The body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene.”

— Matt Ridley

9. “Nature is the length of the rectangle, nurture the width. There can be no rectangle without both.”

— Matt Ridley

10. “Ecology, like genetics, is not about equilibrium states. It is about change, change and change. Nothing stays the same forever.”

— Matt Ridley

11. “The success of human beings depends crucially, but precariously, on numbers and connections. A few hundred people cannot sustain a sophisticated technology: trade is a vital part of the story.”

— Matt Ridley

12. “The Great Man theory lives on as strongly as ever in one field of human endeavour: big business.”

— Matt Ridley

13. “In a massive, long-term study of 17,000 civil servants, an almost unbelievable conclusion emerged: the status of a person’s job was more likely to predict their likelihood of a heart attack than obesity, smoking or high blood pressure.”

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

15. “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 forwards.”

— Matt Ridley

16. “For barter to work, two individuals do not need to offer things of equal value. Trade is often unequal, but still benefits both sides.”

— Matt Ridley

17. “Simple determinism, whether of the genetic or environmental kind, is a depressing prospect for those with a fondness for free will.”

— Matt Ridley

18. “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.”

— Matt Ridley

19. “It is an extraordinary fact, unremembered by most, that in the Anglosphere people live by laws that did not originate with governments at all.”

— Matt Ridley

20. “The police have come to resemble an occupying army who see the citizenry as the enemy.”

— Matt Ridley

21. “Similarity is the shadow of difference. Two things are similar by virtue of their difference from another; or different by virtue of one’s similarity to a third. So it is with individuals.”

— Matt Ridley

22. “Merchants and craftsmen make prosperity; chiefs, priests and thieves fritter it away.”

— Matt Ridley

23. “Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster toward a finish line that is merely the start of the next race.”

— Matt Ridley

24. “The great success of ants and termites – between them they may comprise one-third of all the animal biomass of land animals – is undoubtedly down to their division of labour.”

— Matt Ridley

25. “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. There is not a single example of a country opening its borders to trade and ending up poorer.”

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

27. “The restaurant business is robust and successful precisely because individual restaurants are vulnerable and short-lived. Taleb wishes that society honoured ruined entrepreneurs as richly as it honours fallen soldiers.”

— Matt Ridley

28. “Economists are quick to speak of ‘market failure’, and rightly so, but a greater threat comes from ‘government failure’.”

— Matt Ridley

29. “Specialisation encouraged innovation, because it encouraged the investment of time in a tool-making tool. That saved time, and prosperity is simply time saved, which is proportional to the division of labour.”

— Matt Ridley

30. “Far from being choosy, female primates seemed to be initiators of much promiscuity. Hrdy began to suggest that there was something wrong with the theory rather than the females.”

— Matt Ridley

31. “Human beings innovate by combining and recombining ideas, and the larger and denser the network, the more innovation occurs. Once again, notice that this is not policy.”

— Matt Ridley

32. “The reluctance to accept coincidence lies at the heart of telepathy, spiritualism, ghosts and other manifestations of the supernatural. The mystical mentality insists that something caused a coincidence; something made things go bump in the night. Superstition.”

— Matt Ridley

33. “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.”

— Matt Ridley

34. “Gutenberg made printed books affordable, which kicked off an increase in literacy, which created a market for spectacles, which led to work on lenses that in turn resulted in the invention of microscopes and telescopes, which unleashed the discovery that the earth went round the sun.”

— Matt Ridley

35. “Market failure is a favourite phrase; government failure is not.”

— Matt Ridley

36. “Uniqueness is the commodity of glut.”

— Matt Ridley

37. “There is no permanent ideal of disease resistance, merely the shifting sands of impermanent obsolescence.”

— Matt Ridley

38. “A true scientist is bored by knowledge; it is the assault on ignorance that motivates him – the mysteries that previous discoveries have revealed.”

— Matt Ridley

39. “When I go into the local superstore, I never see people driven to misery by the impossibility of choice. I see people choosing.”

— Matt Ridley

40. “The interaction of genetic and external influences makes my behaviour unpredictable, but not undetermined. In the gap between those words lies freedom.”

— Matt Ridley

41. “Two economists recently concluded, after studying the issue, that the entire concept of food miles is ‘a profoundly flawed sustainability indicator’. Getting food from the farmer to the shop causes just 4 per cent of all its lifetime emissions. Ten times as much carbon is emitted in refrigerating British food as in air-freighting it from abroad, and fifty times as much is emitted by the customer travelling to the shops.”

— Matt Ridley

42. “I think knowledge is a blessing, not a curse. This is especially true in the case of genetic knowledge. To understand the molecular nature of cancer for the first time, to diagnose and prevent Alzheimer’s disease, to discover the secrets of human history, to reconstruct the organisms that populated the pre-Cambrian seas – these seem to me to be immense blessings.”

— Matt Ridley

43. “The truth is that the wild west was without much government, but it was very far from lawless, or even violent.”

— Matt Ridley

44. “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 all be. Moreover, along the way there is no reason we cannot solve the problems that beset us, of economic crashes, population explosions, climate change and terrorism, of poverty, AIDS, depression and obesity.”

— Matt Ridley

45. “In 1900, the average American spent $76 of every $100 on food, clothing and shelter. Today he spends $37.”

— Matt Ridley

46. “Stress can alter the expression of genes, which can affect the response to stress and so on. Human behavior is therefore unpredictable in the short term, but broadly predictable in the long term.”

— Matt Ridley

47. “When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave.”

— Matt Ridley

48. “Intelligence will become more and more collective; innovation and order will become more and more bottom up.”

— Matt Ridley

49. “Fascism, properly understood, is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left. This fact – an inconvenient truth if there ever was one – is obscured in our time by the equally mistaken belief that fascism and communism are opposites. In reality, they are closely related, historical competitors for the same constituents.”

— Matt Ridley

50. “Anyway, if you really want to see the Arpanet as the origin of the internet, please explain why the government sat on it for thirty years and did almost nothing with it until it was effectively privatised in the 1990s, with explosive results.”

— Matt Ridley