Top 250 Matt Ridley Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Let’s give a bit less credit to creationists, while we encourage and celebrate the evolution of everything.”

— Matt Ridley

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

208. “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

209. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

218. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

225. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

232. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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

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

— Matt Ridley

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

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

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

244. “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

245. “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

246. “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

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

— 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. “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