The birth of science as we know it arguably began with Isaac Newton's formulation of the laws of gravitation and motion. It is no exaggeration to say that physics was reborn in the early 20th-century with the twin revolutions of quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity.

I'm really convinced that our descendants a century or two from now will look back at us with the same pity that we have toward the people in the field of science two centuries ago.

The most exciting thing in the twentieth century is science.

Pure phenomenology claims to be the science of pure phenomena. This concept of the phenomenon which was developed under various names as early as the eighteenth century without being clarified is what we shall have to deal with first of all.

Drill everything mine everything roll back regulations tweak the science expedite permits. Sound familiar? The Republicans offer up more 19th-Century solutions to our 21st-Century energy problems.

In the post-enlightenment Europe of the 19th century the highest authority was no longer the Church. Instead it was science. Thus was born racial anti-Semitism based on two disciplines regarded as science in their day - the 'scientific study of race' and the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel.

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.

Of all the failed technologies that litter the onward march of science - steam carriages zeppelins armoured trains - none has been so catastrophic to prosperity as the last century's attempt to generate electricity from nuclear fission.

Biology is now bigger than physics as measured by the size of budgets by the size of the workforce or by the output of major discoveries and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty-first century.

Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.

Polygraph tests are 20th-century witchcraft.

We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like.

The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.

Back then a half-a-century ago the situation was totally different. Economically we were practically on our knees and politically we were still excluded from the community of nations. Today in this respect we have a totally different and much more stable basis.

One of the people that I respect the most now a person I think has done a heck of a lot for this world as a leader is Margaret Thatcher. She helped create a world that offers us a lot of excitement as we look to the next century.

The twentieth century has exhibited a barbarism and lack of respect for human life on a massive scale just about unknown before.

Instead in the absence of respect for human rights science and its offspring technology have been used in this century as brutal instruments for oppression.