298 Quotes by Matt Ridley

Some are worse off than they were just a few months or years before. But the vast majority of people are much better fed, much better sheltered, much better entertained, much better protected against disease and much more likely to live to old age than their ancestors have ever been. The availability of almost everything a person could want or need has been going rapidly upwards for 200 years and erratically upwards for 10,000 years before.

For barter to work, two individuals do not need to offer things of equal value. Trade is often unequal, but still benefits both sides.

Not inventing, and not adopting new ideas, can itself be both dangerous and immoral.

A Californian firm called Morning Star Tomatoes has been experimenting with ‘self-management’ for two decades.

It is the customer who determines what a business is.

Modern philosophers who aspire to rise above the sordid economic reality of the world would do well to recall that this trade made possible the cross-fertilisation of ideas that led to great discoveries.

What is miraculous is that in modern society you can trust and be trusted by a shopkeeper you do not know.

Good institutions cannot usually be imposed from above: that way they are oxymorons.

I think knowledge is a blessing, not a curse. This is especially true in the case of genetic knowledge. To understand the molecular nature of cancer for the first time, to diagnose and prevent Alzheimer’s disease, to discover the secrets of human history, to reconstruct the organisms that populated the pre-Cambrian seas – these seem to me to be immense blessings.