298 Quotes by Matt Ridley

The police have come to resemble an occupying army who see the citizenry as the enemy.

What if morality itself was not handed down from the Judeo-Christian God as a prescription? And was not even the imitation of a Platonic ideal, but was a spontaneous thing produced by social interaction among people seeking to find ways to get along?

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.

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.

Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals. You.

The message from history is so blatantly obvious – that free trade causes mutual prosperity while protectionism causes poverty – that it seems incredible that anybody ever thinks otherwise. There is not a single example of a country opening its borders to trade and ending up poorer.

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.

Political decisions are by definition monopolistic, disenfranchising and despotically majoritarian; markets are good at supplying minority needs.

Henry’s novel The Portrait of a Lady was written in thrall to Darwin’s idea of female choice as a force in evolution.