Matt Ridley famous quotes

07-13-2025

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

#Running #Clever #Agency
You need to understand how human beings bring together their brains and enable their ideas to combine and recombine, to meet and, indeed, to mate. In other words, you need to understand how ideas have sex.
-- Matt Ridley

#Sex #Ideas #Brain
In a massive, long-term study of 17,000 civil servants, an almost unbelievable conclusion emerged: the status of a person's job was more likely to predict their likelihood of a heart attack than obesity, smoking or high blood pressure.
-- Matt Ridley

#Jobs #Heart #Blood
Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster toward a finish line that is merely the start of the next race
-- Matt Ridley

#Running #Race #Lines
Uniqueness is the commodity of glut.
-- Matt Ridley

#Commodity #Uniqueness
We consciously decide whether to consider people; we fall in love despite ourselves; we entirely fail to fall in love with people who fall in love with us. It is a mightily complicated business.
-- Matt Ridley

#Falling In Love #People #Complicated
How much more generous it would be if, instead of writing parables about childhood wounds, psychologists were to accept that some differences between the sexes just are, that they are in the nature of the beasts, because each sex has an evolved tendency to develop that way in response to experience.
-- Matt Ridley

#Sex #Writing #Differences
The body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene
-- Matt Ridley

#Body #Genes #Vehicle
At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.
-- Matt Ridley

#Animal #Way #Humans
The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 coined the term â€˜memeâ€™ for a unit of cultural imitation.
-- Matt Ridley

#Imitation #Memes #Term
Futurology always ends up telling you more about your own time than about the future.
-- Matt Ridley

#Ends
It is the assumption of this book that there is a typical human nature. It is the aim of this book to seek it. Just like a surgeon, a psychiatrist can make all sorts of basic assumptions when a patient lies down upon the couch. He can assume that the patient knows what it means to love, to envy, to trust, to think, to speak, to fear, to smile, to bargain, to covet, to dream, to remember, to sing, to quarrel, to lie. The 'smile' of a baboon is a threat; the smile of a man is a sign of pleasure: it is human nature, the world over.
-- Matt Ridley

#Dream #Lying #Book
The genome is a book that wrote itself, continually adding, deleting and amending over four billion years.
-- Matt Ridley

#Book #Years #Four
Trade is 10 times as old as farming.
-- Matt Ridley

#Motivation #Inspiration #Farming
Intelligence will become more and more collective; innovation and order will become more and more bottom up.
-- Matt Ridley

#Order #Innovation #Collaboration
A true scientist is bored by knowledge; it is the assault on ignorance that motivates him - the mysteries that previous discoveries have revealed.
-- Matt Ridley

#Ignorance #Discovery #Bored
Simple determinism, whether of the genetic or environmental kind, is a depressing prospect for those with a fondness for free will.
-- Matt Ridley

#Depressing #Simple #Environmental
Ecology, like genetics, is not about equilibrium states. It is about change, change and change. Nothing stays the same forever.
-- Matt Ridley

#Forever #Genetics #States
The fuel on which science runs is ignorance. Science is like a hungry furnace that must be fed logs from the forests of ignorance that surround us. In the process, the clearing we call knowledge expands, but the more it expands, the longer its perimeter and the more ignorance comes into view.
-- Matt Ridley

#Running #Ignorance #Views
Our minds have been built by selfish genes, but they have been built to be social, trustworthy and cooperative.
-- Matt Ridley

#Selfish #Mind #Evolution
The interaction of genetic and external influences makes my behaviour unpredictable, but not undetermined. In the gap between those words lies freedom.
-- Matt Ridley

#Lying #Behaviour #Gaps
Society works not because we have consciously invented it, but because it is an ancient product of our evolved predispositions. It is literally in our nature.
-- Matt Ridley

#Evolution #Ancient
It is not a zero sum game. The simple idea of the gains from trade lies at the heart of the modern and the ancient economy, not the power of capital. There is nothing else to it.
-- Matt Ridley

#Zero #Lying #Heart
Prosperity has brought complications. Our lives are busier, faster, more stressful. They're nostalgic for a simpler, slower time.
-- Matt Ridley

#Prosperity #Nostalgic #Stressful

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