The British are supposed to be particularly averse to intellectuals a prejudice closely bound up with their dislike of foreigners. Indeed one important source of this Anglo-Saxon distaste for highbrows and eggheads was the French revolution which was seen as an attempt to reconstruct society on the basis of abstract rational principles.

I was on the football team because I wanted to experience the different iconic social classes of high school. So football for me was an attempt to socially integrate in an interesting way. And then I didn't like it anymore and stopped doing it and focused more on drama and science and other forms of art and music.

Cosmologists have attempted to account for the day-to-day laws you find in textbooks in terms of fundamental 'superlaws ' but the superlaws themselves must still be accepted as brute facts. So maybe the ultimate laws of nature will always be off-limits to science.

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.

The mysteriousness and mystique of space is such that science fiction attempts to tantalize you by telling you a story that could possibly be out there and that's the appeal of science fiction.

Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is of course living in a state of sin.

There's all this stuff that is happening in Edinburgh now it's a sad attempt to create an Edinburgh society similar to a London society a highbrow literature celebrity society.

I was always fascinated by engineering. Maybe it was an attempt maybe to get my father's respect or interest or maybe it was just a genetic love of technology but I was always trying to build things.

In Lincoln's day a President's religion was a very private affair. There were no public prayer meetings no attempts to woo the Religious Right. Few of Lincoln's countrymen knew anything at all of his religious beliefs.

No account of the Renaissance can be complete without some notice of the attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century to reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece.