298 Quotes by Matt Ridley

Let’s give a bit less credit to creationists, while we encourage and celebrate the evolution of everything.

Jeff Bezos’s favourite saying is ‘Start with the customer and work backwards,’ but it is repeated as a mantra so frequently by his staff that you cannot help thinking they start with the boss and work forwards.

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

The richer and more market-oriented societies have become, the nicer people have behaved.

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.

The truth is that the wild west was without much government, but it was very far from lawless, or even violent.

When I go into the local superstore, I never see people driven to misery by the impossibility of choice. I see people choosing.

It is an extraordinary fact, unremembered by most, that in the Anglosphere people live by laws that did not originate with governments at all.

What was the international reaction to this holocaust? The United Nations Secretary General awarded a prize to General Qian in 1983, and recorded his ‘deep appreciation’ for the way in which the Chinese government had ‘marshalled the resources necessary to implement population policies on a massive scale’.