298 Quotes by Matt Ridley

An extraordinarily nimble synthesist, Ridley leaps from chromosome to chromosome in a handy summation of our ever increasing understanding of the roles that genes play in disease, behavior, sexual differences and even intelligence. More important, though, he addresses not only the ethical quandaries faced by contemporary scientists but the reductionist danger in equating inheritability with inevitability.” – The New Yorker.

The number of countries that censor the internet has grown steadily, and now stands at more than forty.

In the search for a strong and permanent glue, Spencer Silver at 3M in Minneapolis found a weak and temporary adhesive instead. This was in 1968. Nobody could think of a use for it, until five years later a colleague named Art Fry remembered it when irritated by his place-markers falling out of a hymn-book while singing in a church choir. He went back to Silver and asked to apply the glue to small sheets of paper. The only paper lying around was bright yellow. The Post-it note was born.

This isn’t about auctions,’ said Meg Whitman, the chief executive of eBay, ‘in fact it’s not about economic warfare. It’s the opposite.’ It was survival of the nicest.

The success of human beings depends crucially, but precariously, on numbers and connections. A few hundred people cannot sustain a sophisticated technology: trade is a vital part of the story.

People increased their birth rate in response to high child death rates. Make them richer and healthier and they would have fewer babies, as had already happened in Europe, where prosperity had led birth rates down, not up.

Those of libertarian bent often prove more generous than those of a socialist persuasion: where the socialist feels that it is government’s job to look after the poor using taxes, libertarians think it is their duty.

So – as animal experiments have suggested – oxytocin does not affect reciprocity, just the tendency to take a social risk, to go out on a limb.

This provided an excuse for sidelining questions of independence – until the subject people were ‘ready’. Hailey got the Americans to go along with this, by suggesting a similar line on Southern segregation. Economic betterment would come first; political liberation could wait.