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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 3db8771 | Is it not striking that the cost of food and clothing has gone steadily downwards over the past fifty years, while the cost of healthcare and education has gone steadily upwards? | Matt Ridley | ||
| cbc2d07 | Simultaneous discovery and invention mean that both patents and Nobel Prizes are fundamentally unfair things. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 99c6bf7 | The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 coined the term 'meme' for a unit of cultural imitation. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 1896243 | With increasingly money-based interactions among strangers, people increasingly began to think of neighbours as potential trading partners rather than potential prey. Killing the shopkeeper makes no sense. | Matt Ridley | ||
| ea6bd74 | Human beings innovate by combining and recombining ideas, and the larger and denser the network, the more innovation occurs. Once again, notice that this is not policy. | Matt Ridley | ||
| fe1d7b5 | The comedian Emo Philips once joked that he considered his brain to be the most fascinating organ in his body - until he realised who was telling him this. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 9226780 | The influence upon our intelligence of events that happened in the womb is three times as great as anything our parents did to us after our birth. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 1a8a727 | As I mentioned earlier, the diagnostic feature of life is that it captures energy to create order. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 117c130 | The Dark Ages were a massive experiment in the back-to-the-land hippy lifestyle (without the trust fund): | Matt Ridley | ||
| 12e7635 | Montagues and Capulets, French and English, Whig and Tory, Airbus and Boeing, Pepsi and Coke, Serb and Muslim, Christian and Saracen - we are irredeemably tribal creatures. The neighbouring or rival group, however defined, is automatically an enemy. Argentinians and Chileans hate each other because there is nobody else nearby to hate. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 9c33a7a | But if there is one dominant myth about the world, one huge mistake we all make, one blind spot, it is that we all go around assuming the world is much more of a planned place than it is. | Matt Ridley | ||
| c089098 | This book argues that evolution is happening all around us. It is the best way of understanding how the human world changes, as well as the natural world. Change in human institutions, artefacts and habits is incremental, inexorable and inevitable. It follows a narrative, going from one stage to the next; it creeps rather than jumps; it has its own spontaneous momentum, | Matt Ridley | ||
| 715f938 | Those of libertarian bent often prove more generous than those of a socialist persuasion: where the socialist feels that it is government's job to look after the poor using taxes, libertarians think it is their duty. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 09c5311 | Technology will find its inventors, rather than vice versa. | Matt Ridley | ||
| a481536 | Studies of criminal records of adoptees in Denmark revealed a strong correlation with the criminal record of the biological parent and a very small correlation with the criminal record of the adopting parent - and even that vanished when controlled for peer-group effects, whereby the adopting parents were found to live in more, or less, criminal neighbourhoods according to whether they themselves were criminals. | Matt Ridley | ||
| a0e5a96 | Progress and success are always relative. When the land was unoccupied by animals, the first amphibian to emerge from the sea could get away with being slow, lumbering, and fish-like, for it had no enemies and no competitors. But if a fish were to take to the land today, it would be gobbled up by a passing fox as surely as a Mongol horde would be wiped out by machine guns. In history and in evolution, progress is always a futile, Sisyphean .. | progress reality | Matt Ridley | |
| bd0e97b | the complexity of society does not imply a planner. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 4076d62 | It is genes that allow the human mind to learn, to remember, to imitate, to imprint, to absorb culture, and to express instincts. Genes are not puppet masters or blueprints. Nor are they just the carriers of heredity. They are active during life; | Matt Ridley | ||
| c3e0a7c | Either human beings must be more instinctive, or animals must be more conscious than we had previously suspected. The similarities, not the differences, were what caught the attention. | Matt Ridley | ||
| f2d87a6 | Humanity is, of course, morally free to make and remake itself infinitely, but we do not do so. | Matt Ridley | ||
| ba08fb1 | You are descended not from your mother but from her ovary. Nothing that happened to her body or her mind in her life could affect your nature | Matt Ridley | ||
| 7c346cc | Because bodies do not replicate themselves but are grown, whereas genes do replicate themselves, it inevitably follows that the body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene, rather than vice versa. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 7661007 | You didn't take part, Benjamin?" Gunther asked, as he passed me a plate of cheese and cold meat. "My brother doesn't play games," said Paul. "He's an aesthete. He sat by the window all afternoon with a funny look on his face: probably composing a tone poem." | Jonathan Coe | ||
| 660e359 | He waited in silence for the blindfold to be tied firmly at the back of his head. 'Right,' said Wilkins, emphatically. 'That should do. How many fingers am I holding up?' 'Three,' said Thomas. 'God damn it to hell, how did you know that? Can you see through the cloth?' 'No. It was a guess.' 'Well you're not supposed to guess. For crying out loud, I'm trying to make sure that you can't see where we're going. We're not here to play guessing g.. | Jonathan Coe | ||
| 72fe7ac | he was the proud owner of a quite colossal member, which on the many awestruck occasions it had been exposed to public view had been compared variously to a giant frankfurter, an overfed python, a length of led piping, the trunk of a rogue elephant, a barrage balloon, an airport-sized Toblerone and a roll of wet wallpaper. | Jonathan Coe | ||
| 9d35197 | You feel safer in your bedroom, but you're actually much safer in the shelter." It didn't matter how I felt. She made me go into the shelter every time the sirens wailed. Men came and removed all the signposts from the roads around the village, so that when Hitler invaded he wouldn't know where he was. When he invaded, we were to bury our radio. Jamie had already dug a hole for it in the garden. When Hitler invaded we were to say nothing, d.. | Kimberly Brubaker Bradley | ||
| 465b5b5 | I took my time exploring. I savored the first minutes in a new home. Carlos would always go straight to unpacking boxes, looking for the sheets and coffeepot and swearing that we were going to get better organized, while I stepped stealthily over the bare floors, peeking around corners and into alluring doors, which generally turned out to be the broom closet. But there was that thrilling sense that, like a new lover, the place held attribu.. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 38410de | When a fine old carpet is eaten by mice, the colors and patterns of what's left behind do not change,' wrote my neighbor and friend, the poet Jane Hirschfield, after she visited an old friend suffering from Alzheimer's disease in a nursing home. And so it was with my father. His mind did not melt evenly into undistinguishable lumps, like a dissolving sand castle. It was ravaged selectively, like Tintern Abbey, the Cistercian monastery in no.. | mind misery ruin sacred tintern-abbey | Katy Butler | |
| 457afb4 | She wondered if her father had awakened yet, if he had missed her, if Jeweltongue would tell him she was only out in the garden, if Tea-cosy's wretchedness would give them all away immediately. She wondered if she had been right to guess that her father would not mend till she left--and that he would mend when she did. Had the Beast sent his illness? Did he watch them from his palace? What a sorcerer could and could not do could never quite.. | Robin McKinley | ||
| 348d021 | Where are we going?" Arin stared out the carriage window at the trees of the Garden District, their bare branches slim and violet in the dusk. Kestrel fidgeted with her skirts. "Arin. You know that we are going to Irex's party." "Yes," he said shortly, but didn't tear his gaze away from the passing trees. Better he look at them than at her. The velvet dress was a deep red, the skirts deliberately crushed in a pattern highlighted by golden .. | Marie Rutkoski | ||
| d6f143d | These bastards who run our country are a bunch of conniving, thieving, smug pricks who need to be brought down and removed and replaced with a whole new system that we control. | Michael Moore | ||
| d6fa19e | Sejarah bukanlah apa yang terjadi. Sejarah hanyalah apa yang dituturkan sejarawan kepada kita. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 59079d5 | By the time I was finished, Dad looked older and sadder than I'd ever seen him. "None of this makes any sense." "I'm beginning to think I should make that the title of my autobiography." | sophie | Rachel Hawkins | |
| ef12360 | Are you saying...you're telling me that it's...over?" "I'm telling you that, for me, it never really began. I'm sorry James. Goodbye." | J.D. Hawkins | ||
| b54d87f | In an age when we have more choice than ever before, more mobility, more information, more opportunity to fulfill ourselves, how is it that people can prefer to be identical? | John Brunner | ||
| b57761b | It's the social counterpart of natural selection. Those groups within society that craved power at the expense of everything else--morality, self-respect, honest friendship--they achieved dominance long ago. The mass of the public no longer has any contact with government; all they know is that if they step out of line they'll be trodden on. | John Brunner | ||
| 8e297f2 | We know, we feel in our guts, that decisions are constantly being made which are going to wreck our ambitions, our dreams, our personal relationships. But the people making those decisions are keeping them secret, because if they don't they'll lose the leverage they have over their subordinates. | John Brunner | ||
| b65b079 | It was also not difficult to forecast that no matter how well endowed they were with material resources those countries where the Industrial Revolution arrived late would change proportionately more slowly. After all, the rich get richer and the poor get children. | John Brunner | ||
| 64bbc4c | Few of us are equipped to cope with the complexity and dazzling variety of twenty-first-century existence. | John Brunner | ||
| 57fcbfb | The explosion of human knowledge has accelerated to the point where even the most brilliant can't cope with it any more. Theories have rigidified into dogma just as they did in the Middle Ages. The leading experts feel obligated to protect their creed against the heretics. | John Brunner | ||
| 066803e | Stand on Zanzibar is an information overload on topics that sensible people would never want to learn about. | John Brunner | ||
| b90c728 | Best if the driver didn't have to get hurt. Though having been fool enough to volunteer for army service, of course, and worse still, having been fool enough to accept orders unquestioningly from a machine... But everybody did that. Everybody, all the time. Otherwise none of this would have been possible. Similarly, none of it would have had to happen. | John Brunner | ||
| 78e8024 | Much earlier than Richardson, before World War I, in fact, Norman Angell had shown that the idea of fighting a war for profit was obsolete. The victors would pay a heavier cost than the losers. He was right, and that First World War proved the fact. The second one hammered it home with everything up to and including nuclear weapons. In an individual one would regard it as evidence of insanity to see someone repeatedly undertaking enterprise.. | John Brunner | ||
| 87c1ad8 | COINCIDENCE You weren't playing attention to the other half of what was going on. | John Brunner |