298 Quotes by Matt Ridley

In Germany too the preservation of nature went hand in hand with the destruction of human life. ‘Ask the trees, they will teach you how to become National Socialists!’ read one Nazi slogan.

What was the secret that the serpent told Eve? That she could eat a certain fruit? Pah. That was a euphemism. The fruit was carnal knowledge and everybody from Thomas Aquinas to Milton knew it.

In the United States, government spending rose from 7.5 per cent of GDP in 1913, to 27 per cent in 1960, to 30 per cent in 2000, to 41 per cent in 2011.

But if there is one dominant myth about the world, one huge mistake we all make, one blind spot, it is that we all go around assuming the world is much more of a planned place than it is.

A corollary of this perspective is that there is no such thing as a perfect market, an equilibrium or an end state.

The reluctance to accept coincidence lies at the heart of telepathy, spiritualism, ghosts and other manifestations of the supernatural. The mystical mentality insists that something caused a coincidence; something made things go bump in the night. Superstition.

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.

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 comedian Emo Philips once joked that he considered his brain to be the most fascinating organ in his body – until he realised who was telling him this.