298 Quotes by Matt Ridley

Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster toward a finish line that is merely the start of the next race

The genome is a book that wrote itself, continually adding, deleting and amending over four billion years.

The message from history is so blatantly obvious - that free trade causes mutual prosperity while protectionism causes poverty - that it seems incredible that anybody ever thinks otherwise. There is not a single example of a country opening its borders to trade and ending up poorer.

It is not a zero sum game. The simple idea of the gains from trade lies at the heart of the modern and the ancient economy, not the power of capital. There is nothing else to it.

A true scientist is bored by knowledge; it is the assault on ignorance that motivates him - the mysteries that previous discoveries have revealed.

The fuel on which science runs is ignorance. Science is like a hungry furnace that must be fed logs from the forests of ignorance that surround us. In the process, the clearing we call knowledge expands, but the more it expands, the longer its perimeter and the more ignorance comes into view.

The interaction of genetic and external influences makes my behaviour unpredictable, but not undetermined. In the gap between those words lies freedom.

Society works not because we have consciously invented it, but because it is an ancient product of our evolved predispositions. It is literally in our nature.

Futurology always ends up telling you more about your own time than about the future.