Top 250 Matt Ridley Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “What is miraculous is that in modern society you can trust and be trusted by a shopkeeper you do not know.”

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

103. “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

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. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

108. “Humanity is, of course, morally free to make and remake itself infinitely, but we do not do so.”

— Matt Ridley

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

118. “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

119. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

125. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

138. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

141. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

143. “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

144. “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

145. “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

146. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

149. “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

150. “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