John Boyd Orr Quotes

World government is a premature concept at this stage. We are moving more and more into supernational arrangements, but it is too early still.

I think we are realizing that we are going to have to have an international rule of law.

We shall have world government whether or not we like it. The only question is whether World government will be achieved by conquest or consent.

I have long believed that the only way peace can be achieved is through world government.

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.

What we need now is a Treaty of the World not a Treaty of Rome.

There is no such thing as the United Nations.

The attractive idea that we can now have a parliament of man with authority to control the conduct of nations by legislation or an international police force with power to enforce national conformity to rules of right conduct is a counsel of perfection.

We could try and establish a world in which the great and the powerful adhere to that international law which they require ordinary mortals to adhere to. In other words, there is one international law, and even America and even Russia and China and Japan must adhere to it, and Australia must adhere to it.

It seems to many of us that if we are to avoid the eventual catastrophic world conflict, we must strengthen the United Nations as a first step toward a world government patterned after our own government with a legislature, executive and judiciary, and police to enforce its international laws and keep the peace.

If the U.N. is ineffective, the whole concept of multilateralism will collapse.

War can only be abolished by the establishment of a world government.

It is quite clear that as long as the nations of the world spend most of their energy, money, and emotional strength in quarreling with words and weapons, a true offensive against the common problems that threaten human survival is not very likely. A world government that can channel human efforts in the direction of the great solutions seems desirable, even essential. Naturally, such a world government should be a federal one, with regional and local autonomy safeguarded and with cultural diversity promoted.

There was an implicit conviction that the UN would be stronger than the sum of its constituent member-states.

To solve the problem of organizing world peace we must establish world law and order.

The nations must be organized internationally and induced to enter into partnership, subordinating in some measure national sovereignty to worldwide institutions and obligations.

If the U.N. didn't exist, we'd be inventing it right now.

Well, there's been plenty of ultimatums, and one thing that we better be very clear is that we can't continue to have the kind of defiance of the United Nations, the defiance of the international community that we've had.

We have actively sought and are actively seeking to make the United Nations an effective instrument of international cooperation.

The UN's unique legitimacy flows from a universal perception that it pursues a larger purpose than the interests of one country or a small group of countries.

Just think of what Woodrow Wilson stood for: he stood for world government. He wanted an early United Nations, League of Nations. But it was the conservatives, Republicans, that stood up against him.

We would have to invent the U.N. if we did not have it, which is not an original thought.

The United Nations has become a place where many countries seek to achieve a lynching of the United States by resolution.

In a shrinking world, the absence of order among nations is becoming less and less tolerable.

The international body must have the institutions and powers it needs to do what it is created to do; in other words it must be boldly and openly set up as a super-state on a level above the national sovereignties, and that, in turn, means that the Member States must have accepted in advance as much limitation and subordination of their particular sovereignties as this superior sovereign power requires.