Time & Perspective Quote by John Boyd Orr

“Intermittent war” is a chillingly tidy phrase: it doesn’t romanticize conflict as destiny, but it also refuses the comforting story that peace is the default setting. John Boyd Orr, a politician who came of age through the industrial slaughter of World War I and spoke in the shadow of World War II and the early Cold War, compresses a century’s worth of disillusionment into a single adjective. Intermittent implies pattern. Not constant chaos, but recurring relapse. Civilization, in this framing, isn’t a moral escalator; it’s a machine that periodically breaks into violence.

The intent is less descriptive than diagnostic. Orr is staking out a realist position: if war keeps returning, it’s not just a failure of diplomacy or bad leaders. It’s structural. The subtext is aimed at policymakers tempted to treat peace as an event rather than an institution. “Intermittent” hints at lulls that get mistaken for progress: treaties signed, borders redrawn, memorials erected, then the same incentives reassemble - scarcity, nationalism, economic shocks, imperial hangovers - and the cycle restarts.

As a political line, it also functions as permission to think big. Orr’s broader public work linked security to material conditions, especially food and health. Read that way, the sentence is a pivot: if war is civilization’s recurring symptom, then prevention can’t be only armies and summits. It has to be infrastructure, welfare, and international cooperation sturdy enough to outlast the lull. The power here lies in its bleak moderation: not apocalyptic, not naive - just accurate enough to make complacency feel irresponsible.