298 Quotes by Matt Ridley

In 1976, when eight million Indians were sterilised, Robert McNamara visited the country and congratulated it: ‘At long last India is moving effectively to address its population problem.

Most of the so-called robber barons got rich by cutting the price of goods, not raising them.

If you divide the world into those countries where the majority live in cities, and those where the majority live in the countryside, you find that the former are four times as wealthy, in terms of average income, as the latter.

Arguably, the orang-utan, being devastated by the loss of forest to palm oil bio-fuel plantations in Borneo, is under greater threat from renewable energy than the polar bear is from global warming.

Technology will find its inventors, rather than vice versa.

Simultaneous discovery and invention mean that both patents and Nobel Prizes are fundamentally unfair things.

In America, roughly 15 per cent of jobs are destroyed every year; and roughly 15 per cent created.

When you think about it, it is rather strange that liberated, freethinking people, when their children reach the age of five, send them off to a sort of prison for the next twelve to sixteen years.

The more prosperous and free that people become, the more their birth rate settles at around two children per woman with no coercion necessary.