John Boyd Orr Quotes
Some think the worst horrors of war might be avoided by an international agreement not to use atomic bombs. This is a vain hope.
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.
The real evil of the Russian communist state is not communism. It is the secret police and the concentration camp.
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.
When the fabric of society is so rigid that it cannot change quickly enough, adjustments are achieved by social unrest and revolutions.
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.
We are now physically, politically, and economically one world and nations so interdependent that the absolute national sovereignty of nations is no longer possible.
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.
Empires won by conquest have always fallen either by revolt within or by defeat by a rival.
Measured in time of transport and communication, the whole round globe is now smaller than a small European country was a hundred years ago.
Our civilization is now in the transition stage between the age of warring empires and a new age of world unity and peace.
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.
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.
Our civilization has evolved through the continuous adjustment of society to the stimulus of new knowledge.
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.
Nearly every country in the world is now becoming industrialized as rapidly as it can.
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.
