John Boyd Orr quotes

John Boyd Orr was a Scottish politician, physician, and biologist renowned for his work in nutrition and public health. His research played a significant role in shaping policies on global food security and health. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts towards combating hunger and promoting international cooperation. Here are 25 of his quotes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Boyd Orr

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Boyd Orr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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