Top 250 Matt Ridley Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “Thanks to a newly perfected technology, the camel, the people of the Arabian Peninsula found themselves well placed to profit from trade between East and West.”

— Matt Ridley

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

109. “You are descended not from your mother but from her ovary. Nothing that happened to her body or her mind in her life could affect your nature.”

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

111. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

113. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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.”

— Matt Ridley

135. “What if morality itself was not handed down from the Judeo-Christian God as a prescription? And was not even the imitation of a Platonic ideal, but was a spontaneous thing produced by social interaction among people seeking to find ways to get along?”

— Matt Ridley

136. “So plants can withstand almost any loss, and regenerate easily. They are utterly decentralised.”

— Matt Ridley

137. “We are perforce in some sense constrained, goaded, or at least affected by the accumulated impact of selective decisions made over thousands of generations.”

— Matt Ridley

138. “I am just a node in a huge network of knowledge, trying to capture an ethereal and evolving entity in a few inadequate words.”

— Matt Ridley

139. “Just like religion, science as an institution is and always has been plagued by the temptations of confirmation bias. With alarming ease it morphs into pseudoscience, even – perhaps especially – in the hands of elite experts, and especially when predicting the future and when there’s lavish funding at stake.”

— Matt Ridley

140. “Vernon Smith and his colleagues have long confirmed that markets in goods and services for immediate consumption – haircuts and hamburgers – work so well that it is hard to design them so they fail to deliver efficiency and innovation; while markets in assets are so automatically prone to bubbles and crashes that it is hard to design them so they work at all.”

— Matt Ridley

141. “Far more than we like to admit, the world is to a remarkable extent a self-organising, self-changing place.”

— Matt Ridley

142. “They may direct the construction of the body and brain in the womb, but then they set about dismantling and rebuilding what they have made almost at once – in response to experience.”

— Matt Ridley

143. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

145. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

148. “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

149. “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

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

— Matt Ridley