John Boyd Orr Quotations

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.