John Boyd Orr Quotes

• Though the general principles of statecraft have survived the rise and fall of empires, every increase in knowledge has brought about changes in the political, economic, and social structure.

  John Boyd Orr

• 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

• 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

• During the last war when there was a market for everything that could be produced, the production capacity of Canada and the United States, which were outside the battle area, increased one hundred percent.

  John Boyd Orr

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• In the last five or six thousand years, empires one after another have arisen, waxed powerful by wars of conquest, and fallen by internal revolution or attack from without.

  John Boyd Orr

• 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

• 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

• However difficult it may be to bring it about, some form of world government, with agreed international law and means of enforcing the law, is inevitable.

  John Boyd Orr

• 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

• 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

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

  John Boyd Orr

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

  John Boyd Orr

• 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

• 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

• 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

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

  John Boyd Orr

John Boyd Orr (26)

Birth:	23rd September, 1880
Death:	25th June, 1971
Nationality:	Scottish
Profession:	Biologist, Physician, Teacher

About

John Boyd Orr was born in Kilmaurs, East Ayrshire, Scotland. He was a Scottish biologist, physician and teacher who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1949 for his scientific research into nutrition and his work as the first Director-General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. He was elected the first president of the World Academy of Art and Science in 1960. After four years as a pupil teacher, at the age of 19 he won a Queen's Scholarship to study at a teacher training college in Glasgow. He graduated B.Sc. in 1910, and M.B. Ch.B. in 1912. In 1914, he graduated M.D. with honours, receiving the Bellahouston Gold Medal for the most distinguished thesis of the year. He wrote several books include: Essentials of Veterinary Physiology (with Diarmid Noel Paton), Food Health and Income (with David Lubbock), What Science Stands for, The Scotland of Our Sons (with Alexander MacLehose), and The Rising Tide.

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