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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

156. “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

157. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

159. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

167. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

183. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

185. “If you think being descended from apes is bad for your self esteem, then get used to the idea that you are also descended from viruses.”

— Matt Ridley

186. “As I mentioned earlier, the diagnostic feature of life is that it captures energy to create order.”

— Matt Ridley

187. “That is the point of agriculture: it diverts the labour of other species to providing services for human beings.”

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

189. “An extraordinarily nimble synthesist, Ridley leaps from chromosome to chromosome in a handy summation of our ever increasing understanding of the roles that genes play in disease, behavior, sexual differences and even intelligence. More important, though, he addresses not only the ethical quandaries faced by contemporary scientists but the reductionist danger in equating inheritability with inevitability.” – The New Yorker.”

— Matt Ridley

190. “In Germany too the preservation of nature went hand in hand with the destruction of human life. ‘Ask the trees, they will teach you how to become National Socialists!’ read one Nazi slogan.”

— Matt Ridley

191. “To me this is a dangerous doctrine, which justifies inflicting real pain in the here and now on disadvantaged people on the basis of forestalling a distant possibility of doom.”

— Matt Ridley

192. “Humanity is experiencing an extraordinary burst of evolutionary change, driven by good old-fashioned Darwinian natural selection. But it is selection among ideas, not among genes.”

— Matt Ridley

193. “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

194. “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

195. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

197. “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

198. “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

199. “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

200. “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