Matt Ridley Quotes

26 quotes in 450 categories

• Our minds have been built by selfish genes, but they have been built to be social, trustworthy and cooperative.
• The interaction of genetic and external influences makes my behaviour unpredictable, but not undetermined. In the gap between those words lies freedom.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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.…
• Intelligence will become more and more collective; innovation and order will become more and more bottom up.
• Trade is 10 times as old as farming.
• The genome is a book that wrote itself, continually adding, deleting and amending over four billion years.
• Uniqueness is the commodity of glut.
• 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…
• 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…
• The body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene
• Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster toward a finish line that is merely the start of the next race
• A true scientist is bored by knowledge; it is the assault on ignorance that motivates him - the mysteries that previous discoveries have revealed.
• 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…
• Simple determinism, whether of the genetic or environmental kind, is a depressing prospect for those with a fondness for free will.
• 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…
• Ecology, like genetics, is not about equilibrium states. It is about change, change and change. Nothing stays the same forever.
• 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…
• I opted for a freelance writing career. I was lucky enough to have the means to do it.

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