Top 250 Matt Ridley Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Either human beings must be more instinctive, or animals must be more conscious than we had previously suspected. The similarities, not the differences, were what caught the attention.”

— Matt Ridley

202. “I find the world is full of people who think that their dependence on others is decreasing, or that they would be better off if they were more self-sufficient, or that technological progress has brought no improvement in the standard of living, or that the world is steadily deteriorating, or that the exchange of things and ideas is a superfluous irrelevance.”

— Matt Ridley

203. “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

204. “With increasingly money-based interactions among strangers, people increasingly began to think of neighbours as potential trading partners rather than potential prey. Killing the shopkeeper makes no sense.”

— Matt Ridley

205. “Because bodies do not replicate themselves but are grown, whereas genes do replicate themselves, it inevitably follows that the body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene, rather than vice versa.”

— Matt Ridley

206. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

209. “The new and crucial ingredient was not the availability of capital, but the advent of market-tested, consumer-driven innovation.”

— Matt Ridley

210. “The media tycoon Ted Turner told a newspaper reporter in 2010 that other countries should follow China’s lead in instituting a one-child policy to reduce global population over time.”

— Matt Ridley

211. “The internet, in other words, may be the best forum for crime, but it is also the best forum for free and fair exchange the world has ever seen.”

— Matt Ridley

212. “In 1976, when eight million Indians were sterilised, Robert McNamara visited the country and congratulated it: ‘At long last India is moving effectively to address its population problem.”

— Matt Ridley

213. “The internet has no centre and no hierarchy. All the computers that use it are equal – ‘peers’ in a network.”

— Matt Ridley

214. “This turns out not to be true. Darwinian change is inevitable in any system of information transmission so long as there is some lumpiness in the things transmitted, some fidelity of transmission and a degree of randomness, or trial and error, in innovation. To say that culture ‘evolves’ is not metaphorical.”

— Matt Ridley

215. “There was never a better illustration of the validity of the Enlightenment dream – that order can emerge where nobody is in charge. The genome, now sequenced, stands as emphatic evidence that there can be order and complexity without any management.”

— Matt Ridley

216. “Nobody ever saw a dog make fair and deliberate exchange of a bone with another dog.”

— Matt Ridley

217. “Smith went one step further, and suggested that morality emerged unbidden and unplanned from a peculiar feature of human nature: sympathy.”

— Matt Ridley

218. “It is common to find that two traders both think their counterparts are idiotically overpaying: that is the beauty of Ricardo’s magic trick.”

— Matt Ridley

219. “Before Medicaid and Medicare existed, writes the American politician and former doctor Ron Paul, ‘every physician understood that he or she had a responsibility towards the less fortunate, and free medical care for the poor was the norm’.”

— Matt Ridley

220. “Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals. You.”

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

223. “It’s no good, you’ll never outrun a bear,” says the logical friend.”

— Matt Ridley

224. “Every class is unfit to govern.’ The problem is not the abuse of power, echoed the motivational speaker Michael Cloud more recently, but the power to abuse. The.”

— Matt Ridley

225. “Even allowing for the hundreds of millions who still live in abject poverty, disease and want, this generation of human beings has access to more calories, watts, lumen-hours, square feet, gigabytes, megahertz, light-years, nanometres, bushels per acre, miles per gallon, food miles, air miles, and of course dollars.”

— Matt Ridley

226. “Morality therefore emerged as a consequence of certain aspects of human nature in response to social conditions.”

— Matt Ridley

227. “The lesson of this study is that, on the whole, having to deal with strangers teaches you to be polite to them, and that in order for such generosity to emerge, costly punishment of selfishness may be necessary.”

— Matt Ridley

228. “Obama himself may have turned out to be something of a dud, but the cult of presidential personality that has dominated American politics for decades now still persists.”

— Matt Ridley

229. “The number of countries that censor the internet has grown steadily, and now stands at more than forty.”

— Matt Ridley

230. “Many people are bothered about the number of privately owned guns in the United States, but what about publicly owned ones?”

— Matt Ridley

231. “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

232. “Good things are gradual; bad things are sudden. Above all, good things evolve.”

— Matt Ridley

233. “TP53 seems to encode the greater good, like a suicide pill in the mouth of a soldier that dissolves only when it detects evidence that he is about to mutiny.”

— Matt Ridley

234. “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

235. “The more prosperous and free that people become, the more their birth rate settles at around two children per woman with no coercion necessary.”

— Matt Ridley

236. “It is the customer who determines what a business is.”

— Matt Ridley

237. “And even modern governments have an element of the crime syndicate about them. Police forces repeatedly harbour criminals all over the world: the US Department of Homeland Security is only a little more than a decade old, but in 2011 over three hundred of its employees were arrested for crimes such as drug smuggling, child pornography and selling intelligence to drug cartels. Like.”

— Matt Ridley

238. “The big firms that survive will do so by turning themselves into bottom-up evolvers.”

— Matt Ridley

239. “Free-market commerce is the only system of human organisation yet devised where ordinary people are in charge – unlike feudalism, communism, fascism, slavery and socialism.”

— Matt Ridley

240. “Considering the way evolution works, it should not be surprising if every man has got a Don Giovanni somewhere inside him.”

— Matt Ridley

241. “Long before he became well known for his atheism, Dawkins was famous for the ideas set out in his book The Selfish Gene.”

— Matt Ridley

242. “Technology will find its inventors, rather than vice versa.”

— Matt Ridley

243. “These features make sense, argues Davies, if you wish to mould people into suitable recruits for a conscript army to fight Napoleon.”

— Matt Ridley

244. “Language is just as rule-based in its newest slang forms, and just as sophisticated as it ever was in ancient Rome. But the rules, now as then, are written from below, not from above.”

— Matt Ridley

245. “Fascism and communism were and are religions of the state.”

— Matt Ridley

246. “In the United States, government spending rose from 7.5 per cent of GDP in 1913, to 27 per cent in 1960, to 30 per cent in 2000, to 41 per cent in 2011.”

— Matt Ridley

247. “Female monkeys, unaware that they are slaves to cultural stereotypes, like things with faces. Male monkeys, unaware that they are doing the bidding of human sexists, like things with moving parts.”

— Matt Ridley

248. “Few debates in the history of science have been conducted with such stupidity as the one about intelligence.”

— Matt Ridley

249. “When I watch Anthony and Cleopatra, I am seeing a four-hundred-year-old interpretation of a two-thousand-year-old history. Yet it never even occurs to me that love was any different then from what it is now. It is not necessary to explain to me why Anthony falls under the spell of a beautiful woman. Across time just as much as across space, the fundamentals of our nature are universally and idiosyncratically human.”

— Matt Ridley

250. “A species that over many generations repeatedly exposes itself to some experience will eventually find its offspring selected for a genetic predisposition to cope with that experience. Why?”

— Matt Ridley