298 Quotes by Matt Ridley

First, I need to convince you that human progress has, on balance, been a good thing, and that, despite the constant temptation to moan, the world is as good a place to live as it has ever been for the average human being – even now in a deep recession.

Trying to replace the common law with a rationally designed law is, he jests, like trying to design a better rhinoceros in a laboratory.

The restaurant business is robust and successful precisely because individual restaurants are vulnerable and short-lived. Taleb wishes that society honoured ruined entrepreneurs as richly as it honours fallen soldiers.

Fundamentally, other animals do not do barter.

By 2010 the internet had roughly as many hyperlinks as the brain has synapses, and a significant proportion of the whispering that goes on within the internet originates in devices rather than people. It is already virtually impossible to turn the internet off.

Yet as soon as Greece was unified into an empire by a thug – Philip of Macedon in 338 BC – it lost its edge.

When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave.

The most important fact about extreme weather is that the number of deaths caused by floods, droughts and storms has dropped by 93 per cent since the 1920s, despite a trebling of the world population: not because the weather has grown less wild, but because the world has grown rich enough to enable us to protect ourselves better.

Many people are bothered about the number of privately owned guns in the United States, but what about publicly owned ones?