298 Quotes by Matt Ridley

I think if you put people in front of some huge temptation where it's possible to grab as much as they can for themselves, almost everyone will. The beauty of commerce is that it mutes that. The chap behind the counter in the corner shop has no interest in short-changing you, because he wants you to come back.

I thought journalism would enable me to be a mile wide and an inch deep.

The reality sunk in that we had no place to live, and we had to find it, ... We had no place for our kids to go to school, and we had to find that. We didn't know about my job, and we had to figure that out. And you're one of a million people trying to do that. It was the moment of feeling like we lost everything and we had to start over. For me, the lowest point was watching my wife come to that realization and break down in tears.

I started out wanting to be a naturalist. My obsession in my youth was with bird-watching. I collected things, I spent a lot of time outdoors. I only vaguely realized that science was a little more than natural history, but by then I was hooked.

I sense very little appetite for green efforts to persuade people to accept a frozen or declining standard of living for the sake of the environment. Recessions remind us that economic retreat or stagnation is painful, whatever the goal.

Nowadays, ideas can meet and mate very much faster than before, and the Internet is only accelerating this process. So innovation is bound to accelerate.

I try and get it right the first time. I may rewrite a sentence four or five times, but I rarely go back and kill a whole page and rewrite it.

It's terrifying the way molecular biology has become more and more jargon ridden. But I strongly believe that my book can be read by the intelligent layman. I want everyone who bought a copy of 'A Brief History of Time' to buy a copy of 'Genome'.

I'm perfectly happy to eat organic food, but if I choose to pay more for it, I don't pat myself on the back ethically. Quite the reverse. I think I'm actually being quite greedy, because what I'm doing is essentially saying, 'I want more land to be devoted to growing my food.'