John Boyd Orr Quotes

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.

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.

If you do an interview in 1960, something it's bound to change by the year 2000. And if it doesn't, then there's something drastically wrong.

There is an old saying that the course of civilization is a race between catastrophe and education. In a democracy such as ours, we must make sure that education wins the race.

Things change in different countries as people grow, and as generations change.

In a world in which the total of human knowledge is doubling about every ten years, our security can rest only on our ability to learn.

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

The history of the world shows that peoples and societies do not have to pass through a fixed series of stages in the course of development.

There certainly have been a lot of changes, although they come in such gradations that most people have either forgotten, or, if they're too young, they never knew about them in the first place.

Civilization and religion do not necessarily move with equal pace.

Upon the progress of knowledge the whole progress of the human race is immediately dependent: he who retards that, hinders this also.

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

… science is the great instrument of social change, all the greater because its object is not change but knowledge, and its silent appropriation of this dominant function, amid the din of political and religious strife, is the most vital of all the revolutions which have marked the development of modern civilization.

It is the object of learning, not only to satisfy the curiosity and perfect the spirits of ordinary men, but also to advance civilization.

Anything that gives us new knowledge gives us an opportunity to be more rational.

History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there's been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it.

There was an age, however, when the transition from savagery to civilization, with all its impressive outward manifestations in art and architecture, took place for the first time.

Each generation is smarter than the generation before, and they need total diversion and encouragement and things to think about.

The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.

Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress.

The history of mankind is the history of ideas.

I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.

I can walk about London and see a society that seems an absolutely revolutionary change from the 1950s, that seems completely and utterly different, and then I can pick up on something where you suddenly see that it's 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.

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.