Considering the way evolution works, it should not be surprising if every man has got a Don Giovanni somewhere inside him.

Trade is 10 times as old as farming.

Genes are biochemical recipes written in a four-letter alphabet called DNA.

This idea holds out hope that the human race will prosper mightily in the years ahead-because ideas are having sex with each other as never before.

You need to understand how human beings bring together their brains and enable their ideas to combine and recombine, to meet and, indeed, to mate. In other words, you need to understand how ideas have sex.

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. There is not a single example of a country opening its borders to trade and ending up poorer.

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.