Matt Ridley People Quotations

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.

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.

Watching those people on television made it hard to feel sorry for myself, ... That was misery - capital M.

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.

If people are all the same underneath, how has society changed so fast and so radically? Life now is completely different to how it was 32,000 years ago. It's changed like that of no other species has. What's made that difference?

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.