John Boyd Orr famous quotes

03-24-2025

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.
-- John Boyd Orr

#Believe #Long #Political
When the fabric of society is so rigid that it cannot change quickly enough, adjustments are achieved by social unrest and revolutions.
-- John Boyd Orr

#Fabric #Unrest #Revolution
Our civilization is now in the transition stage between the age of warring empires and a new age of world unity and peace.
-- John Boyd Orr

#Civilization #Unity #Age
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.
-- John Boyd Orr

#Appreciate #Arms #Territory
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.
-- John Boyd Orr

#War #Mad #Hatred
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.
-- John Boyd Orr

#Airplane #Government #Political
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.
-- John Boyd Orr

#Government #Gunpowder #Warfare
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.
-- John Boyd Orr

#Animal #Past #Records
If people have to choose between freedom and sandwiches they will take sandwiches.
-- John Boyd Orr

#People #Sandwiches #Politics
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.
-- John Boyd Orr

#Powerful #War #Would Be
Nearly every country in the world is now becoming industrialized as rapidly as it can.
-- John Boyd Orr

#Country #World #Becoming
We are now physically, politically, and economically one world and nations so interdependent that the absolute national sovereignty of nations is no longer possible.
-- John Boyd Orr

#World #Sovereignty
Some think the worst horrors of war might be avoided by an international agreement not to use atomic bombs. This is a vain hope.
-- John Boyd Orr

#War #Thinking #Agreement
The history of our civilization has been one of intermittent war.
-- John Boyd Orr

#War #Civilization #Intermittent
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.
-- John Boyd Orr

#Revenge #War #Lust
Empires won by conquest have always fallen either by revolt within or by defeat by a rival.
-- John Boyd Orr

#Rivals #Empires #Defeat
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.
-- John Boyd Orr

#Creating #Revolution #Demand
Measured in time of transport and communication, the whole round globe is now smaller than a small European country was a hundred years ago.
-- John Boyd Orr

#Country #Communication #Years
Our civilization has evolved through the continuous adjustment of society to the stimulus of new knowledge.
-- John Boyd Orr

#Civilization #Stimulus
The real evil of the Russian communist state is not communism. It is the secret police and the concentration camp.
-- John Boyd Orr

#Real #Evil #Police
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.
-- John Boyd Orr

#War #Airplane #World
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.
-- John Boyd Orr

#War #Agriculture #World
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.
-- John Boyd Orr

#Years #Fifty #Lasts
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.
-- John Boyd Orr

#Thinking #Views #Law

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