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.

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.

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

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.

Our civilization is now in the transition stage between the age of warring empires and a new age of world unity and peace.

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

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.