Top 250 Matt Ridley Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

159. “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

160. “A Californian firm called Morning Star Tomatoes has been experimenting with ‘self-management’ for two decades.”

— Matt Ridley

161. “What if renewable energy rolled out on a grand scale proves so environmentally damaging that it does great harm? Bio-energy, a policy intended to forestall global warming, is already killing hundreds of thousands of people each year by putting up the price of food. Various.”

— Matt Ridley

162. “It is my proposition that the human race has become a collective problem-solving machine and it solves problems by changing its ways. It.”

— Matt Ridley

163. “Doomed every four years to disappointment when a demigod turns out to have feet of clay, when the most powerful man in the world turns out not to have much power to change the world, the American people none the less never lose faith in the presidential religion.”

— Matt Ridley

164. “God, Smith just as surely defenestrated Leviathan.”

— Matt Ridley

165. “As Lord Acton said, great men are mostly bad men.”

— Matt Ridley

166. “Is it not striking that the cost of food and clothing has gone steadily downwards over the past fifty years, while the cost of healthcare and education has gone steadily upwards?”

— Matt Ridley

167. “Today, of Americans officially designated as ‘poor’, 99 per cent have electricity, running water, flush toilets, and a refrigerator; 95 per cent have a television, 88 per cent a telephone, 71 per cent a car and 70 per cent air conditioning. Cornelius Vanderbilt had none of these.”

— Matt Ridley

168. “Every minute, every second, the pattern of genes being expressed in your brain changes, often in direct or indirect response to events outside the body. Genes are the mechanisms of experience.”

— Matt Ridley

169. “All Britons are descended from the same set of people a mere thirty generations ago.”

— Matt Ridley

170. “A corollary of this perspective is that there is no such thing as a perfect market, an equilibrium or an end state.”

— Matt Ridley

171. “The elite gets things wrong, says Douglas Carswell in The End of Politics and the Birth of iDemocracy, ‘because they endlessly seek to govern by design a world that is best organized spontaneously from below’. Public policy failures stem from planners’ excessive faith in deliberate design. ‘They consistently underrate the merits of spontaneous, organic arrangements, and fail to recognize that the best plan is often not to have one.”

— Matt Ridley

172. “The moral of this story is that autocrats get too much credit for episodes of increased economic freedom,’ wrote William Easterly.”

— Matt Ridley

173. “In America, roughly 15 per cent of jobs are destroyed every year; and roughly 15 per cent created.”

— Matt Ridley

174. “There has probably never been a generation since the paleolithic that did not deplore the fecklessness of the next and worship a golden memory of the past.”

— Matt Ridley

175. “The traditional university will surely be gone in fifty years, swept away by technology.”

— Matt Ridley

176. “Henry’s novel The Portrait of a Lady was written in thrall to Darwin’s idea of female choice as a force in evolution.”

— Matt Ridley

177. “The real cause of poverty today – now that it is avoidable – is the unchecked power of the state against poor people without rights, says William Easterly.”

— Matt Ridley

178. “Most species do not change their habits during their few million years on earth or alter their lifestyle much in different parts of their range.”

— Matt Ridley

179. “The richer and more market-oriented societies have become, the nicer people have behaved.”

— Matt Ridley

180. “These new people had something special: they were not prisoners of their ecological niche, but could change their habits quite easily if prey disappeared, or better opportunities arose.”

— Matt Ridley

181. “So if gangsters become governments, does this mean that governments began as gangsters?”

— Matt Ridley

182. “Prosperity has brought complications. Our lives are busier, faster, more stressful. They’re nostalgic for a simpler, slower time.”

— Matt Ridley

183. “It is all but inevitable that we occupy a favoured location, one of the rare neighbourhoods where by-laws allow the emergence of intelligent life.’ No anthropic principle needed.”

— Matt Ridley

184. “This is the diagnostic feature of modern life, the very definition of a high standard of living: diverse consumption, simplified production. Make one thing, use lots.”

— Matt Ridley

185. “Modern philosophers who aspire to rise above the sordid economic reality of the world would do well to recall that this trade made possible the cross-fertilisation of ideas that led to great discoveries.”

— Matt Ridley

186. “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. As a result, again and again we mistake cause for effect; we blame the sailing boat for the wind, or credit the bystander with causing the event.”

— Matt Ridley

187. “In short, the explosion in sub-prime lending was a thoroughly top–down, political project, mandated by Congress, implemented by government-sponsored enterprises, enforced by the law, encouraged by the president and monitored by pressure groups.”

— Matt Ridley

188. “For far too long we have underestimated the power of spontaneous, organic and constructive change driven from below, in our obsession with designing change from above. Embrace the general theory of evolution. Admit that everything evolves.”

— Matt Ridley

189. “Countries where commerce thrives have far less violence than countries where it is suppressed. Does.”

— Matt Ridley

190. “Science is like a hungry furnace that must feed from the the forest of ignorance that surrounds us.”

— Matt Ridley

191. “The Planned Parenthood Foundation was founded in 1916 by Margaret Sanger, who thought philanthropy would ‘perpetuate constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents, and dependents’. The organisation’s international arm was headquartered in the offices of the British Eugenics Society as late as 1952.”

— Matt Ridley

192. “By 2010 the internet had roughly as many hyperlinks as the brain has synapses, and a significant proportion of the whispering that goes on within the internet originates in devices rather than people. It is already virtually impossible to turn the internet off.”

— Matt Ridley

193. “This isn’t about auctions,’ said Meg Whitman, the chief executive of eBay, ‘in fact it’s not about economic warfare. It’s the opposite.’ It was survival of the nicest.”

— Matt Ridley

194. “So – as animal experiments have suggested – oxytocin does not affect reciprocity, just the tendency to take a social risk, to go out on a limb.”

— Matt Ridley

195. “People increased their birth rate in response to high child death rates. Make them richer and healthier and they would have fewer babies, as had already happened in Europe, where prosperity had led birth rates down, not up.”

— Matt Ridley

196. “What was the international reaction to this holocaust? The United Nations Secretary General awarded a prize to General Qian in 1983, and recorded his ‘deep appreciation’ for the way in which the Chinese government had ‘marshalled the resources necessary to implement population policies on a massive scale’.”

— Matt Ridley

197. “It makes more sense to see the body as serving the needs of the genes than vice versa. Bottom–up.”

— Matt Ridley

198. “The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 coined the term ‘meme’ for a unit of cultural imitation.”

— Matt Ridley

199. “In fact the discoveries of Gregor Mendel, which became known to the world in 1900, ought to have killed eugenics stone dead.”

— Matt Ridley

200. “This was socialism without the state. There is no doubt that it would have continued to expand and evolve.”

— Matt Ridley