Quotes from Matt Ridley

The number of countries that censor the internet has grown steadily, and now stands at more than forty.

Just as human nature is the same everywhere, so it is recognizably the same as it was in the past. A Shakespeare play is about motives and predicaments and feelings and personalities that are instantly familiar. Falstaff's bombast, Iago's cunning, Leontes's jealousy, Rosalind's strength, and Malvolio's embarrassment have not changed in four hundred years. Shakespeare was writing about the same human nature that we know today. Only

As Lord Acton said, great men are mostly bad men.

the whole point of science, the whole thrust of the Enlightenment, is the rejection of arguments from authority.

Lectures, says Minerva's Stephen Kosslyn, are 'a great way to teach, but a terrible way to learn'.

today people farm (i.e., plough, crop or graze) just 38 per cent of the land area of the earth, whereas with 1961 yields they would have to farm 82 per cent to feed today's population.

The traditional university will surely be gone in fifty years, swept away by technology.

A species that over many generations repeatedly exposes itself to some experience will eventually find its offspring selected for a genetic predisposition to cope with that experience. Why?

The Great Man theory lives on as strongly as ever in one field of human endeavour: big business.

a person who is free to make a $20,000 purchase of a car as a customer, might not be free to buy an office chair for $500 as an employee. Little wonder that big companies grow more slowly than small ones (firms whose chief executives attend the annual World Economic Forum schmooze-fest in Davos tend to underperform the stock market), and big public bodies have worse reputations than small ones.

Doomed every four years to disappointment when a demigod turns out to have feet of clay, when the most powerful man in the world turns out not to have much power to change the world, the American people none the less never lose faith in the presidential religion.

all gods and all superstitions emerge from within human minds, and go through characteristic but unplanned transformations as history unfolds. Thus even the most top–down feature of human culture is actually a bottom–up, emergent phenomenon. O'Grady

Jeff Bezos's favourite saying is 'Start with the customer and work backwards,' but it is repeated as a mantra so frequently by his staff that you cannot help thinking they start with the boss and work forwards.

The media tycoon Ted Turner told a newspaper reporter in 2010 that other countries should follow China's lead in instituting a one-child policy to reduce global population over time. Malthus's

China today has the economy of a twenty-first-century economic superpower with a political regime little changed since the 1950s. Is this slow evolution in political institutions down to the concentration or the dispersion of power?

Religions always and everywhere insist upon the argument from authority. You should do this or that because the Pope or the Koran or the local priest says you should. For centuries most of the world convinced itself that the only reason people act morally is because of instruction, that in effect without superstition there can be no ethical behaviour.

The richer and more market-oriented societies have become, the nicer people have behaved.

what really works inside a big firm is division of labour: you do what you're good at, I'll do what I'm good at, and we'll coordinate our actions. That is what actually happens in practice inside most companies, and good management means good coordination. The employees specialise and exchange, just like participants in a market, or citizens in a city.

We are perforce in some sense constrained, goaded, or at least affected by the accumulated impact of selective decisions made over thousands of generations.

The reluctance to accept coincidence lies at the heart of telepathy, spiritualism, ghosts and other manifestations of the supernatural. The mystical mentality insists that something caused a coincidence; something made things go bump in the night. Superstition

No, what really works inside a big firm is division of labour: you do what you're good at, I'll do what I'm good at, and we'll coordinate our actions. That is what actually happens in practice inside most companies, and good management means good coordination. The employees specialise and exchange, just like participants in a market, or citizens in a city.

It is pure fatalism, undiluted by environmental variability. Good living, good medicine, healthy food, loving families or great riches can do nothing about. Your fate is in your genes. Like a pure Augustinian, you go to heaven by God's grace, not by good works. It reminds us that the genome, great book that it is, may give us the bleakest kind of self-knowledge: the knowledge of our destiny, not the kind of knowledge that you can do something about, but the curse of Tiresias.

So – as animal experiments have suggested – oxytocin does not affect reciprocity, just the tendency to take a social risk, to go out on a limb.

This provided an excuse for sidelining questions of independence – until the subject people were 'ready'. Hailey got the Americans to go along with this, by suggesting a similar line on Southern segregation. Economic betterment would come first; political liberation could wait.