Top 250 Matt Ridley Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “It is genes that allow the human mind to learn, to remember, to imitate, to imprint, to absorb culture, and to express instincts. Genes are not puppet masters or blueprints. Nor are they just the carriers of heredity. They are active during life;.”

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

53. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

56. “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

57. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

89. “The obsession with which those on the right resist Charles Darwin’s insight – that the complexity of nature does not imply a designer – matches the obsession with which those on the left resist Adam Smith’s insight – that the complexity of society does not imply a planner.”

— Matt Ridley

90. “It is not confined to genetic systems, but explains the way that virtually all of human culture changes: from morality to technology, from money to religion.”

— Matt Ridley

91. “The comedian Emo Philips once joked that he considered his brain to be the most fascinating organ in his body – until he realised who was telling him this.”

— Matt Ridley

92. “First, I need to convince you that human progress has, on balance, been a good thing, and that, despite the constant temptation to moan, the world is as good a place to live as it has ever been for the average human being – even now in a deep recession.”

— Matt Ridley

93. “And by forcing ourselves to learn something, we place ourselves in a selective environment that puts a premium on a future instinctive solution to the problem. Thus, learning gradually gives way to instinct.”

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

95. “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

96. “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

97. “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

98. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley