298 Quotes by Matt Ridley

Long before he became well known for his atheism, Dawkins was famous for the ideas set out in his book The Selfish Gene.

Science is like a hungry furnace that must feed from the the forest of ignorance that surrounds us.

Nature is the length of the rectangle, nurture the width. There can be no rectangle without both.

Then there appeared upon the earth a new kind of hominid, which refused to play by the rules. Without any changes in its body, and without any succession of species, it just kept changing its habits. For the first time its technology changed faster than its anatomy. This was an evolutionary novelty, and you are it. When.

Some thought they were messages from Gaia to tell humanity to combat global warming.

The Planned Parenthood Foundation was founded in 1916 by Margaret Sanger, who thought philanthropy would ‘perpetuate constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents, and dependents’. The organisation’s international arm was headquartered in the offices of the British Eugenics Society as late as 1952.

Economists are quick to speak of ‘market failure’, and rightly so, but a greater threat comes from ‘government failure’.

So if gangsters become governments, does this mean that governments began as gangsters?

The success of trust-based peer organizations such as eBay, Wikipedia, and the open-source movement, indicates that trust is a highly expandable network property.