33+ Matt Ridley Quotes On Virtue, Covid And Science

Matt Ridley is a British journalist, author, and businessman. He is best known for his work on science, technology and economics, and is currently a columnist for The Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Spectator. He is the author of several books, including The Rational Optimist, The Evolution of Everything, and The Red Queen. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Matt Ridley on leadership, life, love.

Top 10 Matt Ridley Quotes

1. This idea holds out hope that the human race will prosper mightily in the years ahead-because ideas are having sex with each other as never before.
2. 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.
3. The interaction of genetic and external influences makes my behaviour unpredictable, but not undetermined. In the gap between those words lies freedom.
4. Prosperity has brought complications. Our lives are busier, faster, more stressful. They're nostalgic for a simpler, slower time.
5. The genome is a book that wrote itself, continually adding, deleting and amending over four billion years.
6. At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.
7. Futurology always ends up telling you more about your own time than about the future.
8. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 coined the term ‘meme’ for a unit of cultural imitation.
9. Every minute, every second, the pattern of genes being expressed in your brain changes, often in direct or indirect response to events outside the body. Genes are the mechanisms of experience.
10. A true scientist is bored by knowledge; it is the assault on ignorance that motivates him - the mysteries that previous discoveries have revealed.

Matt Ridley Short Quotes

• How did we become the only species that becomes more prosperous as it becomes more populous?
• The body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene
• Uniqueness is the commodity of glut.
• Trade is 10 times as old as farming.
• Genes are biochemical recipes written in a four-letter alphabet called DNA.

Matt Ridley Famous Quotes And Sayings

You need to understand how human beings bring together their brains and enable their ideas to combine and recombine, to meet and, indeed, to mate. In other words, you need to understand how ideas have sex. — Matt Ridley

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. — Matt Ridley

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. — Matt Ridley

In a massive, long-term study of 17,000 civil servants, an almost unbelievable conclusion emerged: the status of a person's job was more likely to predict their likelihood of a heart attack than obesity, smoking or high blood pressure. — Matt Ridley

Considering the way evolution works, it should not be surprising if every man has got a Don Giovanni somewhere inside him. — Matt Ridley

Simple determinism, whether of the genetic or environmental kind, is a depressing prospect for those with a fondness for free will. — Matt Ridley

The average Mexican lives longer now than the average Briton did in 1955. Infant mortality is lower today in Nepal than it was in Italy in 1951. The proportion of Vietnamese living on less than $2 a day has dropped from 90 per cent to 30 per cent in twenty years. The rich have got richer, but the poor have done even better. — Matt Ridley

Ecology, like genetics, is not about equilibrium states. It is about change, change and change. Nothing stays the same forever. — Matt Ridley

Ocean acidification looks suspiciously like a back-up plan by the environmental pressure groups in case the climate fails to warm: another try at condemning fossil fuels. [...] Even if the world warms as much as the consensus expects, the net harm still looks small alongside the real harm now being done by preventable causes; and if it does warm this much, it will be because more people are rich enough to afford to do something about it. — Matt Ridley

We consciously decide whether to consider people; we fall in love despite ourselves; we entirely fail to fall in love with people who fall in love with us. It is a mightily complicated business. — Matt Ridley

Intelligence will become more and more collective; innovation and order will become more and more bottom-up. — Matt Ridley

How much more generous it would be if, instead of writing parables about childhood wounds, psychologists were to accept that some differences between the sexes just are, that they are in the nature of the beasts, because each sex has an evolved tendency to develop that way in response to experience. — Matt Ridley

A cumulative change of less than 2°C by the end of this century will do no net harm. It will actually do net good [...] rainfall will increase slightly, growing seasons will lengthen, Greenland's ice cap will melt only very slowly, and so on. — Matt Ridley

It-was a tiny mollusc that caused Walter, grandfather of the greatest biologist of the twentieth century, to forge a brief link with the greatest biologist of the nineteenth: Charles Darwin. . . . . . We know this because later that day he wrote hesitantly to Darwin to report what he had found. — Matt Ridley

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. — Matt Ridley

As a small boy Francis Crick had been haunted by a fear that by the time he grew up everything would have been discovered. Inspired by Arthur Mee — Matt Ridley

Our minds have been built by selfish genes, but they have been built to be social, trustworthy and cooperative. — Matt Ridley

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

Life Lessons by Matt Ridley

1. Matt Ridley's career as a journalist has taught him the importance of seeking out the truth and being open to new ideas. He encourages others to question the status quo and to think critically about the world around them.
2. He also emphasizes the importance of resilience and perseverance, as he has faced many challenges in his career and has continued to push forward in spite of them.
3. Finally, Matt Ridley's work has taught him to be an advocate for the things he believes in and to use his platform to speak up for those who don't have a voice.