John Boyd Orr Quotes

Our civilization is now in the transition stage between the age of warring empires and a new age of world unity and peace.

There can be no peace in the world so long as a large proportion of the population lack the necessities of life and believe that a change of the political and economic system will make them available. World peace must be based on world plenty.

The increase of territory and power of empires by force of arms has been the policy of all great powers, and it has always been possible to get the approval of their state religion.

When the fabric of society is so rigid that it cannot change quickly enough, adjustments are achieved by social unrest and revolutions.

Science has produced such powerful weapons that in a war between great powers there would be neither victor nor vanquished. Both would be overwhelmed in destruction.

As I have tried to show, science, in producing the airplane and the wireless, has created a new international political environment to which governments must adjust their foreign policies.

We are now physically, politically, and economically one world and nations so interdependent that the absolute national sovereignty of nations is no longer possible.

Knowledge acquired in biological research is seldom directly applicable to human beings ... The results of scientific research, obtained under these conditions, cannot be applied directly to human beings who vary widely in their hereditary make-up, in their environment, and in their past health record.

Nearly every country in the world is now becoming industrialized as rapidly as it can.

If the views I have expressed be right, we can think of our civilization evolving with the growth of knowledge from small wandering tribes to large settled law.

It is said that those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. It may well be that a war neurosis stirred up by propaganda of fear and hatred is the prelude to destruction.

In the last fifty years science has advanced more than in the 2,000 previous years and given mankind greater powers over the forces of nature than the ancients ascribed to their gods.

The real evil of the Russian communist state is not communism. It is the secret police and the concentration camp.

When the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century brought a rapid increase in wealth, the demand of workers for a fair share of the wealth they were creating was conceded only after riots and strikes.

Empires won by conquest have always fallen either by revolt within or by defeat by a rival.

Our civilization has evolved through the continuous adjustment of society to the stimulus of new knowledge.

In recent times, European nations, with the use of gunpowder and other technical improvements in warfare, controlled practically the whole world. One, the British Empire, brought under one government a quarter of the earth and its inhabitants.

Some think the worst horrors of war might be avoided by an international agreement not to use atomic bombs. This is a vain hope.

Some wars have been due to the lust of rulers for power and glory, or to revenge to wipe out the humiliation of a former defeat.

Measured in time of transport and communication, the whole round globe is now smaller than a small European country was a hundred years ago.

After the First World War the economic problem was no longer one of production. It was the problem of finding markets to get the output of industry and agriculture dispersed and consumed.

As we have seen, the wireless and the airplane have made the world so small and nations so dependent on each other that the only alternative to war is the United States of the World.

The history of our civilization has been one of intermittent war.