Top 100 Matt Ridley Quotes

#1. The struggle for existence never gets easier. However well a species may adapt to its environment, it can never relax, because its competitors and its enemies are also adapting to their niches. Survival is a zero-sum game.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #21079
#2. Specialisation encouraged innovation, because it encouraged the investment of time in a tool-making tool. That saved time, and prosperity is simply time saved, which is proportional to the division of labour.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #24715
#3. As Edward Glaeser put it, 'Thoreau was wrong. Living in the country is not the right way to care for the Earth. The best thing that we can do for the planet is build more skyscrapers.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #25263
#4. It's terrifying the way molecular biology has become more and more jargon ridden. But I strongly believe that my book can be read by the intelligent layman. I want everyone who bought a copy of 'A Brief History of Time' to buy a copy of 'Genome'.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #107926
#5. At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #121424
#6. 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

Matt Ridley Quotes #134024
#7. I opted for a freelance writing career. I was lucky enough to have the means to do it.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #207955
#8. Ecology, like genetics, is not about equilibrium states. It is about change, change and change. Nothing stays the same forever.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #220759
#9. Political decisions are by definition monopolistic, disenfranchising and despotically majoritarian; markets are good at supplying minority needs.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #244659
#10. 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

Matt Ridley Quotes #262179
#11. 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

Matt Ridley Quotes #287160
#12. I'm perfectly happy to eat organic food, but if I choose to pay more for it, I don't pat myself on the back ethically. Quite the reverse. I think I'm actually being quite greedy, because what I'm doing is essentially saying, 'I want more land to be devoted to growing my food.'

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #298292
#13. The restaurant business is robust and successful precisely because individual restaurants are vulnerable and short-lived. Taleb wishes that society honoured ruined entrepreneurs as richly as it honours fallen soldiers.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #356182
#14. What is truly revolutionary about molecular biology in the post-Watson-Crick era is that it has become digital ... the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like.' -Richard Dawkins

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #407427
#15. Considering the way evolution works, it should not be surprising if every man has got a Don Giovanni somewhere inside him.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #408412
#16. If people are all the same underneath, how has society changed so fast and so radically? Life now is completely different to how it was 32,000 years ago. It's changed like that of no other species has. What's made that difference?

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #438170
#17. 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

Matt Ridley Quotes #444187
#18. All Britons are descended from the same set of people a mere thirty generations ago.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #462785
#19. 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.

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Matt Ridley Quotes #466742
#20. I thought journalism would enable me to be a mile wide and an inch deep.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #482040
#21. Random violence makes the news precisely because it is so rare, routine kindness does not make the news precisely because it is so commonplace. (104)

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #495407
#22. The real tragedy of nationalised education is how little innovation it has seen.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #496225
#23. Our minds have been built by selfish genes, but they have been built to be social, trustworthy and cooperative.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #525767
#24. Though politicians are regarded as scum, government as a machine is held to be almost infallible.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #535810
#25. 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

Matt Ridley Quotes #548711
#26. Nature is the length of the rectangle, nurture the width. There can be no rectangle without both.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #577433
#27. Anyway, if you really want to see the Arpanet as the origin of the internet, please explain why the government sat on it for thirty years and did almost nothing with it until it was effectively privatised in the 1990s, with explosive results.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #595818
#28. Government can encourage innovation, but mainly by doing less, not doing more.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #615343
#29. Trying to replace the common law with a rationally designed law is, he jests, like trying to design a better rhinoceros in a laboratory.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #654080
#30. It is genes that allow the human mind to learn, to remember, to imitate, to imprint, to absorb culture, and to express instincts. Genes are not puppet masters or blueprints. Nor are they just the carriers of heredity. They are active during life;

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Matt Ridley Quotes #660888
#31. I don't have to," replies the philosopher. "I only have to outrun you.")

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #726229
#32. China today has the economy of a twenty-first-century economic superpower with a political regime little changed since the 1950s. Is this slow evolution in political institutions down to the concentration or the dispersion of power?

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #736432
#33. At this point, the analysis of gene expression in the brain isn't prectical because current (and foreseeable)techniques require that we analyze a piece of brain tissue. Most people find that unpleasant.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #740589
#34. The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella).

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #751077
#35. It is when we go beyond instinct that we seem most idiosyncratically human. Perhaps, as Darwin suggested, the difference is one of degree rather than kind; it is quantitative, not qualitative.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #818506
#36. I sense very little appetite for green efforts to persuade people to accept a frozen or declining standard of living for the sake of the environment. Recessions remind us that economic retreat or stagnation is painful, whatever the goal.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #859453
#37. 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

Matt Ridley Quotes #871280
#38. 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

Matt Ridley Quotes #876257
#39. The interaction of genetic and external influences makes my behaviour unpredictable, but not undetermined. In the gap between those words lies freedom.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #889345
#40. Futurology always ends up telling you more about your own time than about the future.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #891850
#41. It is strange to me that most people assume companies will be imperfect (as they are), but they assume that government agencies will be perfect, which they are not.

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Matt Ridley Quotes #904439
#42. As a broad generalisation, the more people trust each other in a society, the more prosperous that society is, and trust growth seems to precede income growth.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #908585
#43. There is a regrettable human tendency to exaggerate stability, to believe in equilibrium ... It is about change, change and change. Nothing stays same forever.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #954046
#44. 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.

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Matt Ridley Quotes #955223
#45. Life is a slippery thing to define, but it consists of two very different skills: the ability to replicate, and the ability to create order.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #955226
#46. Similarity is the shadow of difference. Two things are similar by virtue of their difference from another; or different by virtue of one's similarity to a third. So it is with individuals.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #975160
#47. 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

Matt Ridley Quotes #994386
#48. Prosperity has brought complications. Our lives are busier, faster, more stressful. They're nostalgic for a simpler, slower time.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #1011985
#49. Nowadays, ideas can meet and mate very much faster than before, and the Internet is only accelerating this process. So innovation is bound to accelerate.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #1056996
#50. If, as a professor, you ask four men and two women each to wear a cotton T-shirt, no deodorant and no perfume, for two nights, then hand these T-shirts to you, you will probably be humored as a mite kinky.

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Matt Ridley Quotes #1071560
#51. Human beings innovate by combining and recombining ideas, and the larger and denser the network, the more innovation occurs. Once again, notice that this is not policy.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #1119102
#52. 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

Matt Ridley Quotes #1136986
#53. 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

Matt Ridley Quotes #1146728
#54. Sex is merely a genetic joint venture. the process of choosing somebody to have sex with, which used to be known as falling in love, is mysterious, cerebral, and highly selective.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #1148484
#55. Intelligence will become more and more collective; innovation and order will become more and more bottom up.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #1168054
#56. each person 'intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention'. Yet

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #1168188
#57. I try and get it right the first time. I may rewrite a sentence four or five times, but I rarely go back and kill a whole page and rewrite it.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #1188143
#58. This idea holds out hope that the human race will prosper mightily in the years ahead-because ideas are having sex with each other as never before.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #1207150
#59. As I mentioned earlier, the diagnostic feature of life is that it captures energy to create order.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #1226328
#60. In 1900, the average American spent $76 of every $100 on food, clothing and shelter. Today he spends $37.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #1262529
#61. 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

Matt Ridley Quotes #1313314
#62. 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

Matt Ridley Quotes #1352240
#63. These were people collaborating because they wanted to, not because they were paid to, and with little or no intellectual property in their ideas.

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Matt Ridley Quotes #1356720
#64. The genome is a book that wrote itself, continually adding, deleting and amending over four billion years.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #1366843
#65. A four-letter alphabet called DNA.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #1387545
#66. Sex is not about reproduc-tion, gender is not about males and females, courtship is not aboutpersuasion, fashion is not about beauty, and love is not about affec-tion. Below the surface of every banality and cliche there lies irony,cynicism, and profundity.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #1397909
#67. Trade is 10 times as old as farming.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #1447194
#68. the complexity of society does not imply a planner.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #1455400
#69. 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

Matt Ridley Quotes #1458484
#70. 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

Matt Ridley Quotes #1463619
#71. Yet the evidence, from twin studies, from the children of immigrants and from adoption studies, is now staring us in the face: people get their personalities from their genes and from their peers, not from their parents.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #1469679
#72. Stress can alter the expression of genes, which can affect the response to stress and so on. Human behavior is therefore unpredictable in the short term, but broadly predictable in the long term.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #1476024
#73. Simple determinism, whether of the genetic or environmental kind, is a depressing prospect for those with a fondness for free will.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #1486629
#74. Male animals have a finite sum of energy that they can spend on testosterone or immunity to disease, but not both at the same time.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #1496970
#75. Throughout history, the characteristic feature of the nation state is its monopoly of violence.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #1505500
#76. 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

Matt Ridley Quotes #1509390
#77. People are attracted to people of high reproductive and genetic potential - the healthy, the fit, and the powerful.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #1533398
#78. 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

Matt Ridley Quotes #1546403
#79. 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

Matt Ridley Quotes #1560437
#80. 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

Matt Ridley Quotes #1561832
#81. I started out wanting to be a naturalist. My obsession in my youth was with bird-watching. I collected things, I spent a lot of time outdoors. I only vaguely realized that science was a little more than natural history, but by then I was hooked.

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Matt Ridley Quotes #1576840
#82. The genome that we decipher in this generation is but a snapshot of an ever-changing document. There is no definitive edition.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #1582341
#83. simplicity piled upon simplicity creates complexity.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #1592538
#84. In America, roughly 15 per cent of jobs are destroyed every year; and roughly 15 per cent created.

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Matt Ridley Quotes #1618718
#85. Uniqueness is the commodity of glut.

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Matt Ridley Quotes #1649519
#86. Far from being laws to protect women, antipolygamy statutes may really do more to protect men.

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Matt Ridley Quotes #1655724
#87. The body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene

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Matt Ridley Quotes #1666976
#88. Far from being parasitic exploiters of the workers, most businessmen were innovators looking to outwit their rivals, by doing things better or cheaper, and in doing so they inevitably brought improvements to the living standards of consumers. Most

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #1677625
#89. Genes are biochemical recipes written in a four-letter alphabet called DNA.

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Matt Ridley Quotes #1688755
#90. It's no good, you'll never outrun a bear, says the logical friend.

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Matt Ridley Quotes #1705952
#91. The mind drives the body, which drives the genome.

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Matt Ridley Quotes #1720752
#92. They may direct the construction of the body and brain in the womb, but then they set about dismantling and rebuilding what they have made almost at once - in response to experience.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #1723569
#93. Anaxagoras' belief that lying on the right side during sex would produce a boy was so influential that centuries later some French aristocrats had their left testicles amputated.

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Matt Ridley Quotes #1751789
#94. 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.

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Matt Ridley Quotes #1756894
#95. 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.

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Matt Ridley Quotes #1778404
#96. Evolutionary biologist Ryan Gregory put it, anyone who thinks he or she can assign a function to every letter in the human genome should be asked why an onion needs a genome that is about five times larger than a person's. Who's resorting

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Matt Ridley Quotes #1804361
#97. 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

Matt Ridley Quotes #1828280
#98. I want to do for every aspect of the human world a little bit of what Charles Darwin did for biology, and get you to see past the illusion of design, to see the emergent, unplanned, inexorable and beautiful process of change that lies underneath.

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Matt Ridley Quotes #1834200
#99. Half the ideas in this book are probably wrong.

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Matt Ridley Quotes #1849375
#100. Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster toward a finish line that is merely the start of the next race

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley Quotes #1862051

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