1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
5443
5482
5483
5484
5485
5486
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 9a0bae2 | From 2000, Fannie and Freddie's appetite for sub-prime loans increased markedly every year, encouraging a rich harvest of increasingly crazy loans by mortgage originators to supply this appetite. House-builders, lenders, mortgage brokers, Wall Street underwriters, legal firms, housing charities and pressure groups like ACORN all benefited. Taxpayers did not. By the early 2000s, Fannie and Freddie were well intertwined with politicians, dona.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 8189b01 | The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all. It is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry to put down dissent and originality,' said H.L. Mencken. | Matt Ridley | ||
| f55162f | Smith went one step further, and suggested that morality emerged unbidden and unplanned from a peculiar feature of human nature: sympathy. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 2615c17 | 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. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 073bb60 | 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? | Matt Ridley | ||
| 1fb163d | We are perforce in some sense constrained, goaded, or at least affected by the accumulated impact of selective decisions made over thousands of generations. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 1beee7a | 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. | Matt Ridley | ||
| ce9188a | events are shaped by history rather than vice versa. | Matt Ridley | ||
| ea284f3 | These new people had something special: they were not prisoners of their ecological niche, but could change their habits quite easily if prey disappeared, or better opportunities arose. | Matt Ridley | ||
| bc7b0d4 | And the good news is that there is no inevitable end to this process. The more people are drawn into the global division of labour, the more people can specialise and exchange, the wealthier we will all be. Moreover, along the way there is no reason we cannot solve the problems that beset us, of economic crashes, population explosions, climate change and terrorism, of poverty, AIDS, depression and obesity. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 26b91a3 | It is not confined to genetic systems, but explains the way that virtually all of human culture changes: from morality to technology, from money to religion. | Matt Ridley | ||
| b1591bd | The Planned Parenthood Foundation was founded in 1916 by Margaret Sanger, who thought philanthropy would 'perpetuate constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents, and dependents'. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 10105dc | This turns out not to be true. Darwinian change is inevitable in any system of information transmission so long as there is some lumpiness in the things transmitted, some fidelity of transmission and a degree of randomness, or trial and error, in innovation. To say that culture 'evolves' is not metaphorical. | Matt Ridley | ||
| c0892f1 | if life needs no intelligent designer, then why should the market need a central planner? | Matt Ridley | ||
| 619e89d | Besides, we now know that virtually all the evidence purporting to show how parental influences shape our character is deeply flawed. There is indeed a correlation between abusing children and having been abused as a child, but it can be entirely accounted for by inherited personality traits. The children of abusers inherit their persecutor's characteristics. Properly controlled for this effect, studies leave no room for nurture determinism.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 485b607 | In the beginning was the word. The word proselytised the sea with its message, copying itself unceasingly and forever. The word discovered how to rearrange chemicals so as to capture little eddies in the stream of entropy and make them live. The word transformed the land surface of the planet from a dusty hell to a verdant paradise. The word eventually blossomed and became sufficiently ingenious to build a porridgy contraption called a huma.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 3aa35d6 | In history and in evolution, progress is always a futile, Sisyphean struggle to stay in the same relative place by getting ever better at things. Cars move through the congested streets of London no faster than horse-drawn carriages did a century ago. Computers have no effect on productivity because people learn to complicate and repeat tasks that have been made easier.13 This concept, that all progress is relative, has come to be known in .. | Matt Ridley | ||
| b12f340 | almost all biologists agreed that no creature could ever evolve the ability to help its species at the expense of itself. Only when the two interests coincided would it act selflessly. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 05cac82 | And there are genes that can be used to write the history of human migrations in the last few thousand years. From four billion years ago to just a few hundred years ago, the genome has been a sort of autobiography for our species, recording the important events as they occurred. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 22663ea | This concept, that all progress is relative, has come to be known in biology by the name of the Red Queen, after a chess piece that Alice meets in Through the Looking-Glass, who perpetually runs without getting very far because the landscape moves with her. It is an increasingly influential idea in evolutionary theory, and one that will recur throughout the book. The faster you run, the more the world moves with you and the less you make pr.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| b580f2d | Apart from the fusion of chromosome 2, visible differences between chimp and human chromosomes are few and tiny. In thirteen chromosomes no visible differences of any kind exist. If you select at random any 'paragraph' in the chimp genome and compare it with the comparable 'paragraph' in the human genome, you will find very few 'letters' are different: on average, less than two in every hundred. We are, to a ninety-eight per cent approximat.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| f90abe8 | 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 | Matt Ridley | ||
| 977f0da | When I watch Anthony and Cleopatra, I am seeing a four-hundred-year-old interpretation of a two-thousand-year-old history. Yet it never even occurs to me that love was any different then from what it is now. It is not necessary to explain to me why Anthony falls under the spell of a beautiful woman. Across time just as much as across space, the fundamentals of our nature are universally and idiosyncratically human. | Matt Ridley | ||
| e202796 | nature has never found human incomprehension a reason for changing her methods. | nature | Matt Ridley | |
| 9c1c036 | Merchants and craftsmen make prosperity; chiefs, priests and thieves fritter it away. | Matt Ridley | ||
| c5f71ca | And by forcing ourselves to learn something, we place ourselves in a selective environment that puts a premium on a future instinctive solution to the problem. Thus, learning gradually gives way to instinct. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 6a98225 | 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. | Matt Ridley | ||
| ab8876b | The world's cities already contain half the world's people, but they occupy less than 3 per cent of the world's land area. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 6ef1424 | The more prosperous and free that people become, the more their birth rate settles at around two children per woman with no coercion necessary. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 8031f60 | Henry's novel The Portrait of a Lady was written in thrall to Darwin's idea of female choice as a force in evolution. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 46d1e0e | It's such a weird thing for young people to look at distorted images of things they should be.' --Daisy Ridley, on why she quit Instagram | Matt Haig | ||
| 12c5bd4 | The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, by Matt Ridley The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, by Steven Pinker, Harvard Professor and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Abundance: The Future is Better Than you Think, by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler | Douglas E. Richards | ||
| 77a4aa2 | Free will was not created for fun; there was a reason that evolution handed our ancestors the ability to take initiatives (...) eventually to be in a better position to reproduce and rear children than human beings who do not reproduce. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 4c06a80 | We now know that Lamarckism cannot work because bodies are built from cakelike recipes, not architectural blueprints, and it is simply impossible to feed information back into the recipe by changing the cake. | Matt Ridley | ||
| e40062e | Half an hour later, as I was deeply immersed in the story of The Man of the Hill, that curious, lengthy digression which seems to have nothing to do with the main narrative but is in fact its cornerstone.. | Jonathan Coe | ||
| 505857f | Am I the same person that I dream about? | Jonathan Coe | ||
| 9aeafa8 | Well, I thought you might want to listen to this. I mean, I thought you might be . . . ready for it. "I don't know if you remember, but just before . . . just before Malcolm died, he took me to see a concert in the town. We went to Barbarella's, and we heard all these weird bands. You remember the kind of music he used to like? Well, the people who made this record were playing that night, and they were his favourite. He liked them more tha.. | Jonathan Coe | ||
| 3b7efdd | Hey - Duggie! Duggie! Duggie!" He came running up to me, sparkler in hand. I felt like sticking one on him, the cheeky bastard. Nobody called me Duggie. He held the sparkler up in front of my face and said, "Wait. Wait." I was already waiting. What else was there to do? "Here you are," he said. "Look! What's this?" At that precise moment, his sparkler fizzled out. I didn't say anything, so he supplied the answer himself. "The death of the s.. | Jonathan Coe | ||
| 37d610f |
Apo to kentro tou kathe trapeziou, metakinetheke ena mikro kukliko kommati, san katapakte, apo kheria pou etan sten arkhe orata* kai mesa apo kathe anoigma pou demiourgetheke, emphanisteke ena antriko kephali. Exenta diaphoretika antrika kephalia se exenta diaphoretika trapezia. Ta somata tous paremenan kato apo ta trapezia, aorata. (...) <|
|
live-menu
|
Jonathan Coe |
|
| 9c51219 | They sat and drank their pints. The tables in which their faces were dimly reflected were dark brown, the darkest brown, the colour of Bournville chocolate. The walls were a lighter brown, the colour of Dairy Milk. The carpet was brown, with little hexagons of a slightly different brown, if you looked closely. The ceiling was meant to be off-white, but was in fact brown, browned by the nicotine smoke of a million unfiltered cigarettes. Most.. | Jonathan Coe | ||
| 9d8ffd5 | Das Pub. Das Britannia. Ein uriges altes Wirtshaus, so britisch wie ... der Bowlerhut und Fisch und Chips, stellvertretend fur die beste Gastlichkeit, die unser Land zu bieten hat.<< Mr Ellis erschauderte. >>Die armen Belgier. Das wollen wir ihnen also zumuten, ja? Wurstchen mit Kartoffelbrei und Schweinspastete von vorletzter Woche, heruntergespult mit einem Pint lauwarmes Bitter. Leute sind schon wegen weniger ausgewandert.<< | Jonathan coe | ||
| d690edc | Le auto sono come le persone. Ogni giorno andiamo in giro in mezzo alla ressa, corriamo di qua e di la, arrivando quasi a toccarci ma in realta c'e pochissimo contatto. Tutti quegli scontri mancati. Tutte quelle opportunita perse. E' inquietante, a pensarci bene. Forse e meglio non pensarci affatto | Jonathan Coe | ||
| a2f2f36 | You're right, Margaret, absolutely right. Things have changed a lot, even since I've been here. It's a different place now. Better in some ways, worse in others." "Better!" she echoed, scornfully." | Jonathan Coe | ||
| 0d9621b | Can you make her out at all?' Benjamin shrugged. As usual, in Cicely's presence, he was afraid of appearing inarticulate, and as usual, this fear robbed him of his power of speech. | Jonathan Coe |