Top 250 Matt Ridley Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 3 of 6

101. “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

102. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

104. “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

105. “Montagues and Capulets, French and English, Whig and Tory, Airbus and Boeing, Pepsi and Coke, Serb and Muslim, Christian and Saracen – we are irredeemably tribal creatures. The neighbouring or rival group, however defined, is automatically an enemy. Argentinians and Chileans hate each other because there is nobody else nearby to hate.”

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

113. “In the 1950s it took thirty minutes work to earn the price of a McDonald’s cheeseburger; today it takes three minutes.”

— Matt Ridley

114. “Not inventing, and not adopting new ideas, can itself be both dangerous and immoral.”

— Matt Ridley

115. “It is when we go beyond instinct that we seem most idiosyncratically human. Perhaps, as Darwin suggested, the difference is one of degree rather than kind; it is quantitative, not qualitative.”

— Matt Ridley

116. “The world’s cities already contain half the world’s people, but they occupy less than 3 per cent of the world’s land area.”

— Matt Ridley

117. “In truth, far from being unsustainable, the interdependence of the world through trade is the very thing that makes modern life as sustainable as it is.”

— Matt Ridley

118. “But if there is one dominant myth about the world, one huge mistake we all make, one blind spot, it is that we all go around assuming the world is much more of a planned place than it is.”

— Matt Ridley

119. “Peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less,’ he.”

— Matt Ridley

120. “It follows a narrative, going from one stage to the next; it creeps rather than jumps; it has its own spontaneous momentum, rather than being driven from outside; it has no goal or end in mind; and it largely happens by trial and error – a version of natural selection.”

— Matt Ridley

121. “He asked the question: ‘What kind of company do we want this to be?’, and the answer built upon three principles: that people are happiest when they have personal control over their life; that people are ‘thinking, energetic, creative and caring’; and that the best human organisations are ones like voluntary bodies that are not managed by others, but in which participants coordinate among themselves. Defying.”

— Matt Ridley

122. “I forecast that the twenty-first century will show a continuing expansion of catallaxy – Hayek’s word for spontaneous order created by exchange and specialisation.”

— Matt Ridley

123. “An evolutionary bargain seems to have been struck: in exchange for sexual exclusivity, the man brings meat and protects the fire from thieves and bullies; in exchange for help rearing the children, the woman brings veg and does much of the cooking. This may explain why human beings are the only great apes with long pair bonds. Just.”

— Matt Ridley

124. “Society works not because we have consciously invented it, but because it is an ancient product of our evolved predispositions. It is literally in our nature.”

— Matt Ridley

125. “By striking contrast, there is not a single non-renewable resource that has run out yet: not coal, oil, gas, copper, iron, uranium, silicon, or stone.”

— Matt Ridley

126. “Fundamentally, other animals do not do barter.”

— Matt Ridley

127. “Far from being parasitic exploiters of the workers, most businessmen were innovators looking to outwit their rivals, by doing things better or cheaper, and in doing so they inevitably brought improvements to the living standards of consumers. Most.”

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

129. “Yet as soon as Greece was unified into an empire by a thug – Philip of Macedon in 338 BC – it lost its edge.”

— Matt Ridley

130. “Top–down language teaching just does not work well – it’s like learning to ride a bicycle in theory, without ever getting on one.”

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

132. “It reminds us that the genome, great book that it is, may give us the bleakest kind of self-knowledge: the knowledge of our destiny, not the kind of knowledge that you can do something about, but the curse of Tiresias.”

— Matt Ridley

133. “The market is a system of mass cooperation.”

— Matt Ridley

134. “Throughout history, the characteristic feature of the nation state is its monopoly of violence.”

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

136. “Today, the drumbeat has become a cacophony. The generation that has experiences more peace, freedom, leisure time, education, medicine, travel, movies, mobile phones, and massages than any generation in history is lapping up gloom at every opportunity.”

— Matt Ridley

137. “Though politicians are regarded as scum, government as a machine is held to be almost infallible.”

— Matt Ridley

138. “Google has likewise turned itself into a trial-and-error company, by encouraging employees to spend 20 per cent of their time on their own projects.”

— Matt Ridley

139. “Then there appeared upon the earth a new kind of hominid, which refused to play by the rules. Without any changes in its body, and without any succession of species, it just kept changing its habits. For the first time its technology changed faster than its anatomy. This was an evolutionary novelty, and you are it. When.”

— Matt Ridley

140. “This provided an excuse for sidelining questions of independence – until the subject people were ‘ready’. Hailey got the Americans to go along with this, by suggesting a similar line on Southern segregation. Economic betterment would come first; political liberation could wait.”

— Matt Ridley

141. “Shakespeare was a far better psychologist than Freud, and Jane Austen a far better sociologist than Durkheim.”

— Matt Ridley

142. “Because it is a monopoly, government brings inefficiency and stagnation to most things it runs; government agencies pursue the inflation of their budgets rather than the service of their customers; pressure groups form an unholy alliance with agencies to extract more money from taxpayers for their members. Yet despite all this, most clever people still call for government to run more things and assume that if it did so, it would somehow be more perfect, more selfless, next time.”

— Matt Ridley

143. “As a result, whereas other primates have guts weighing four times their brains, the human brain weighs more than the human intestine. Cooking enabled hominids to trade gut size for brain size. Erectus.”

— Matt Ridley

144. “The influence upon our intelligence of events that happened in the womb is three times as great as anything our parents did to us after our birth.”

— Matt Ridley

145. “All that determinists are asking you to accept is that there cannot be effect without cause.”

— Matt Ridley

146. “Some are worse off than they were just a few months or years before. But the vast majority of people are much better fed, much better sheltered, much better entertained, much better protected against disease and much more likely to live to old age than their ancestors have ever been. The availability of almost everything a person could want or need has been going rapidly upwards for 200 years and erratically upwards for 10,000 years before.”

— Matt Ridley

147. “The simple one-way relationship that so entrances our politicians and commentators – education spending in, economic growth out – simply doesn’t exist.”

— Matt Ridley

148. “It’s time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy,’ said Albert Shanker, long-serving President of the American Federation of Teachers.”

— Matt Ridley

149. “The most important fact about extreme weather is that the number of deaths caused by floods, droughts and storms has dropped by 93 per cent since the 1920s, despite a trebling of the world population: not because the weather has grown less wild, but because the world has grown rich enough to enable us to protect ourselves better.”

— Matt Ridley

150. “Cities, marriage, language, music, art – these manifestations of culture all change in regular and retrospectively predictable ways, but in ways that nobody did predict, let alone direct. They evolve.”

— Matt Ridley