Top 250 Matt Ridley Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave.”

— Matt Ridley

52. “Education, done properly, is an emergent, evolutionary phenomenon.”

— Matt Ridley

53. “No horoscope matches this accuracy. No theory of human causality, Freudian, Marxist, Christian or animist, has ever been so precise. No prophet in the Old Testament, no entrail-grazing oracle in ancient Greece, no crystal-ball gypsy clairvoyant on the pier at Bognor Regis ever pretended to tell people exactly when their lives would fall apart, let alone got it right.”

— Matt Ridley

54. “Friedrich Hayek advanced the view that the common law contributed to greater economic welfare because it was less interventionist, less under the tutelage of the state, and was better able to respond to change than civil legal systems; indeed, it was for him a legal system that led, like the market, to a spontaneous order.”

— Matt Ridley

55. “They had stumbled on what Friedrich Hayek called the catallaxy: the ever-expanding possibility generated by a growing division of labour.”

— Matt Ridley

56. “To put my explanation in its boldest and most surprising form: bad news is manmade, top–down, purposed stuff, imposed on history. Good news is accidental, unplanned, emergent stuff that gradually evolves. The things that go well are largely unintended; the things that go badly are largely intended.”

— Matt Ridley

57. “If God is not needed for morality, and if language is a spontaneous system, then perhaps the king, the pope and the official are not quite as vital to the functioning of an orderly society as they pretend?”

— Matt Ridley

58. “As Edward Glaeser put it, ‘Thoreau was wrong. Living in the country is not the right way to care for the Earth. The best thing that we can do for the planet is build more skyscrapers.”

— Matt Ridley

59. “Some thought they were messages from Gaia to tell humanity to combat global warming.”

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

61. “Organic farming also originated in vitalism, its founder Rudolf Steiner believing that in order ‘to influence organic life on earth through cosmic and terrestrial forces’, it was necessary to ‘stimulate vitalizing and harmonizing processes in the soil’, an insight he acquired through clairvoyance.”

— Matt Ridley

62. “Yet the evidence, from twin studies, from the children of immigrants and from adoption studies, is now staring us in the face: people get their personalities from their genes and from their peers, not from their parents.”

— Matt Ridley

63. “Just as human nature is the same everywhere, so it is recognizably the same as it was in the past. A Shakespeare play is about motives and predicaments and feelings and personalities that are instantly familiar. Falstaff’s bombast, Iago’s cunning, Leontes’s jealousy, Rosalind’s strength, and Malvolio’s embarrassment have not changed in four hundred years. Shakespeare was writing about the same human nature that we know today. Only.”

— Matt Ridley

64. “Giving money to poor people is not a sustainable solution to poverty. So how do you help poor people? Do you instruct, plan and order their lives with expertise and lots of government, or do you get them freedom to exchange and specialise, so that prosperity can evolve? Friedrich.”

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

66. “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 beautiful process of change that lies underneath.”

— Matt Ridley

67. “We consciously decide whether to consider people; we fall in love despite ourselves; we entirely fail to fall in love with people who fall in love with us. It is a mightily complicated business.”

— Matt Ridley

68. “American presidential politics is entirely based on the myth that a perfect, omniscient, virtuous and incorruptible saviour will emerge from the New Hampshire primary every four years, and proceed to lead his people to the promised land.”

— Matt Ridley

69. “China today has the economy of a twenty-first-century economic superpower with a political regime little changed since the 1950s. Is this slow evolution in political institutions down to the concentration or the dispersion of power?”

— Matt Ridley

70. “Studies of criminal records of adoptees in Denmark revealed a strong correlation with the criminal record of the biological parent and a very small correlation with the criminal record of the adopting parent – and even that vanished when controlled for peer-group effects, whereby the adopting parents were found to live in more, or less, criminal neighbourhoods according to whether they themselves were criminals.”

— Matt Ridley

71. “If you divide the world into those countries where the majority live in cities, and those where the majority live in the countryside, you find that the former are four times as wealthy, in terms of average income, as the latter.”

— Matt Ridley

72. “Perhaps the internet has returned us to a world a bit like the Stone Age in which there is no place for a fraudster to hide.”

— Matt Ridley

73. “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. Survival is a zero-sum game.”

— Matt Ridley

74. “We now know that Lamarckism cannot work because bodies are built from cakelike recipes, not architectural blueprints, and it is simply impossible to feed information back into the recipe by changing the cake.”

— Matt Ridley

75. “Like Milton Friedman, I notice that ’business corporations in general are not defenders of free enterprise. On the contrary, they are one of the chief sources of danger.”

— Matt Ridley

76. “The genome is as complicated and indeterminate as ordinary life, because it is ordinary life. This should come as a relief. Simple determinism, whether of the genetics or environmental kind, is a depressing prospect for those with a fondness for free will.”

— Matt Ridley

77. “With the first steam engines, the barrier between heat and work was breached, so that coal’s energy could now amplify the work of people.”

— Matt Ridley

78. “Neanderthals had all of these: huge brains, probably complex languages, lots of technology. But they never burst out of their niche. It is my contention that in looking inside our heads, we would be looking in the wrong place to explain this extraordinary capacity for change in the species. It was not something that happened within a brain. It was some thing that happened between brains. It was a collective phenomenon. Look.”

— Matt Ridley

79. “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’.”

— Matt Ridley

80. “There are two ways to tell the story of the twentieth century. You can describe a series of wars, revolutions, crises, epidemics, financial calamities. Or you can point to the gentle but inexorable rise in the quality of life of almost everybody on the planet: the swelling of income, the conquest of disease, the disappearance of parasites, the retreat of want, the increasing persistence of peace, the lengthening of life, the advances in technology.”

— Matt Ridley

81. “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.”

— Matt Ridley

82. “In civilized society,’ wrote Adam Smith, an individual ’stands at all times in need of the co-operation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons.”

— Matt Ridley

83. “Life adapted to the laws of physics, not vice versa.”

— Matt Ridley

84. “When you think about it, it is rather strange that liberated, freethinking people, when their children reach the age of five, send them off to a sort of prison for the next twelve to sixteen years.”

— Matt Ridley

85. “As a broad generalisation, the more people trust each other in a society, the more prosperous that society is, and trust growth seems to precede income growth.”

— Matt Ridley

86. “The idea that the State originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscation – that is to say, in crime.’ Perhaps we have left all that behind, and the state is now evolving steadily towards benign and gentle virtue. Perhaps not. Tudor.”

— Matt Ridley

87. “Religions always and everywhere insist upon the argument from authority. You should do this or that because the Pope or the Koran or the local priest says you should. For centuries most of the world convinced itself that the only reason people act morally is because of instruction, that in effect without superstition there can be no ethical behaviour.”

— Matt Ridley

88. “Simultaneous discovery and invention mean that both patents and Nobel Prizes are fundamentally unfair things.”

— Matt Ridley

89. “You put garbage in the rubbish bin; you keep junk in the attic or garage.”

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

91. “Most aid is delivered by governments to governments.”

— Matt Ridley

92. “The more a country adopted central planning, the better its education system did, but the worse its economic performance – not least because, like Egypt, it churned out many would-be bureaucrats trained to do the central planning.”

— Matt Ridley

93. “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.”

— Matt Ridley

94. “Those of libertarian bent often prove more generous than those of a socialist persuasion: where the socialist feels that it is government’s job to look after the poor using taxes, libertarians think it is their duty.”

— Matt Ridley

95. “The mind drives the body, which drives the genome.”

— Matt Ridley

96. “The fuel on which science runs is ignorance. Science is like a hungry furnace that must be fed logs from the forests of ignorance that surround us. In the process, the clearing we call knowledge expands, but the more it expands, the longer its perimeter and the more ignorance comes into view.”

— Matt Ridley

97. “These were people collaborating because they wanted to, not because they were paid to, and with little or no intellectual property in their ideas.”

— Matt Ridley

98. “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, combinatorial, selective and in some vague sense progressive.”

— Matt Ridley

99. “Today we are still in thrall to Great Man history, if only because we like reading biography. American presidential politics is entirely based on the myth that a perfect, omniscient, virtuous and incorruptible saviour will emerge from the New Hampshire primary every four years, and proceed to lead his people to the promised land. Never was this messianic mood more extreme than on the day Barack Obama won the presidency.”

— Matt Ridley

100. “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, Asian economies grew their way out of poverty in the late twentieth century, while African economies failed to be aided out of poverty. Trade, not aid, proved the best way to achieve an increase in prosperity.”

— Matt Ridley