John Boyd Orr Quotes

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

Education, particularly higher education, will take Africa into the mainstream of globalization.

With the emergence of civilization, the rate of change shifted from hundreds of thousands of years to millennia. With the emergence of science as a way of knowing the universe, the rate of change shifted to centuries.

We are living in a Golden Age, the most gilded Golden Age of human history—not only of past history, but of future history.

The longer a region is in contact with modern civilization, the higher the degree to which the society in the region is civilized.

North American society could not have reached its state of high development and modernity had it not been an open society.

It is just because civilization is ever evolving, changing, and becoming more complicated, that experts find it so difficult to define it in explicit terms.

The human condition today is better than it's ever been, and technology is one of the reasons for that.

Where humanity is going to find itself in, say, 20, 30, 40, or 50 years would be very difficult to predict, I think. There are moments, of course, when you think that it's going from bad to worse, but there are other moments when you think that human efforts are really flowering into something really fantastic.

I consider that there are different degrees of civilization and there are many different ways of expressing it. But one is civilized or is not.

In any case, in so far as our knowledge of the universe carries us, the advent of civilization for the first time on our globe represents the highest ascent of the life processes to which evolution had anywhere attained.

Civilization in its present form hasn't got long.

Think about it for a brief moment. Suspend disbelief. Wind the clock forward 100 years. Do you think, as a species, we will still be struggling with the things that vex us today? Will we still be arguing about the same stuff? We will still be eating Cocoa Puffs? We are at the end of the beginning.

To-day it appears as though it may well be altogether abolished in the future as it has to some extent been mitigated in the past by the unceasing, and as it now appears, unlimited ascent of man to knowledge, and through knowledge to physical power and dominion over Nature.

A new civilization was not to be improvised by a single mind.

The subject of history is the gradual realization of all that is practically necessary.

… the biography of mankind

The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilization.

When I contemplate the immense advances in sciences and discoveries in the arts which have been made within the period of my life, I look forward with confidence to equal advances by the present generation, and have no doubt they will consequently be as much wiser than we have been as we than our fathers were, and they than the burners of witches

What can we expect from nations still less advanced in civilization than the [Ancient] Greeks?

It is common to think of our own time as standing on the apex of human history.

The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvellous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us.

I'm so thankful to have been born in the times that we live in.

Society is changing constantly, and changing faster than we think.

All peoples have contributed to the overall progress and enhancement of human life.