Top 250 Matt Ridley Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “Arguably, the orang-utan, being devastated by the loss of forest to palm oil bio-fuel plantations in Borneo, is under greater threat from renewable energy than the polar bear is from global warming.”

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

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

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

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

171. “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

172. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

174. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

176. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

183. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

190. “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

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. “Let’s give a bit less credit to creationists, while we encourage and celebrate the evolution of everything.”

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

195. “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

196. “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

197. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

199. “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

200. “The real tragedy of nationalised education is how little innovation it has seen.”

— Matt Ridley