Top 15 Matt Ridley Quotes

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.

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

Random violence makes the news precisely because it is so rare, routine kindness does not make the news precisely because it is so commonplace. (104)

Because it is a monopoly, government brings inefficiency and stagnation to most things it runs; government agencies pursue the inflation of their budgets rather than the service of their customers; pressure groups form an unholy alliance with agencies to extract more money from taxpayers for their members. Yet despite all this, most clever people still call for government to run more things and assume that if it did so, it would somehow be more perfect, more selfless, next time.

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

Half the ideas in this book are probably wrong.

Sex is not about reproduc-tion, gender is not about males and females, courtship is not aboutpersuasion, fashion is not about beauty, and love is not about affec-tion. Below the surface of every banality and cliche there lies irony,cynicism, and profundity.

The body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene

It is strange to me that most people assume companies will be imperfect (as they are), but they assume that government agencies will be perfect, which they are not.

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

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.

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.

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

At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.