Leadership Quote by John Boyd Orr

History becomes a conveyor belt in John Boyd Orr's sentence: empire rises, feeds on conquest, and collapses under pressures it can neither digest nor outrun. The phrasing is deliberately procedural - "one after another", "waxed powerful", "fallen" - as if Orr is stripping grandeur from imperial mythology and replacing it with a repeatable mechanism. That cool cadence is the point. Empires like to sell themselves as destiny; Orr recasts them as a pattern with a predictable end.

As a politician best known for linking nutrition, poverty, and peace, Orr isn't doing armchair antiquarianism. He's making a policy argument in historical drag: if power is built through organized violence, it produces internal contradictions - inequality, resentment, overextension - that eventually detonate. His pairing of "internal revolution" and "attack from without" is telling. It's not just that enemies topple empires; empires manufacture enemies at home and abroad. Conquest expands borders, then expands the list of people who have reasons to resist.

The time scale - "five or six thousand years" - widens the frame beyond any single nation, which is a subtle rebuke to mid-century exceptionalism. Writing in the shadow of two world wars and at the dawn of decolonization, Orr is warning that modern states are not exempt from the old cycle just because their armies are mechanized or their rhetoric is moralized. The intent isn't to scold the past; it's to puncture complacency in the present, and to suggest that stability comes less from dominating others than from building societies that don't curdle from within.